


Written in the scars on our hearts

by redroslin



Series: Written in the scars [4]
Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant to 3.12 - Rapture, Canonical Presumed Character Death, Character Death Fix-It, Dee Shot First, Dee is a mess, Dee is too good for these assholes, Discussion of sedoretu but no actual sedoretu was harmed in the making of this fic, F/F, F/M, Fix-It, Idiots in Love, Kara is a mess (but what else is new), Limericks, M/M, Mindfuck, Multi, Polyamory, Quad of Doom, Sedoretu, So is Sam Anders, Sports and math as inarticulate metaphors for love, author apologizes for all the tags holy frak, but it's Battlestar so, everyone is a mess, not the same characters though, or rather Leemericks
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-10
Updated: 2018-09-01
Packaged: 2018-11-12 13:11:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 16
Words: 39,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11162532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redroslin/pseuds/redroslin
Summary: Frakked up was a way of life, and it was exactly what Kara deserved. What she didn't deserve was this weird happily-ever-after where she woke up in bed with her spouses (spouses, plural, what the frak?) in Commander's quarters on Pegasus (and hadn't that ship been destroyed?). And things only got stranger from there.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Syzygy](https://archiveofourown.org/works/743546) by [Saathi1013](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Saathi1013/pseuds/Saathi1013). 
  * Inspired by [Knowing](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1787245) by [astolat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/astolat/pseuds/astolat). 



> This fic draws heavily on Saathi1013's brilliant series, [Ephemerides](http://archiveofourown.org/series/41303). It also steals its major plot device from one of my favourite MCU fics, [Knowing](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1787245) by astolat. If you like what I'm doing here, I hope you'll check out one or both of those because they are SUPER DUPER AWESOME.
> 
> I'll be posting the first 6 chapters this week, and the rest is very much in progress.
> 
> Title from Pink's Just Give Me a Reason.

It was warm, and dark, and Kara felt safe.

That couldn't be right.

Security wasn't meant for frak-ups like Kara Thrace.

Where the frak _was_ she? Fighting the urge to press her face into her pillow and fall back asleep, she cracked one eyelid to peer through the shadows... and found herself faced with a pair of delicate, sloped shoulders and a graceful back. A very naked and all too familiar back.

She had always loved the constellation of birthmarks on the curve of Dee's left shoulder, and seeing it again after all this time made her want to lick it, to nibble her way up Dee's neck to that spot behind her ear that made her twitch and laugh and bite back.

No, no, no, this could not be happening. She couldn't possibly have been that dumb.

What the frak was she doing _in bed with Dee?_

Because if she'd somehow fallen into bed with Dee, right after telling Lee she wouldn't divorce Sam to be with him, then that was even more messed up than--

Someone turned over and sighed behind her.

 _How many people_ was she in bed with, exactly?

Moving as carefully as she could so as not to jostle anyone, she managed to twist far enough to make out the even-more-familiar profile behind her: Sam, lying on his back, limbs sprawled loosely and breathing slow with sleep.

She was lying naked in bed between--no, it couldn't be.

She was lying in bed with Anastasia Dualla and Samuel Anders. Frak her.

And actually, she felt pretty well frakked out, so it seemed more than likely that's what they had been doing. Gods. Her head started to pound. How drunk had she _been_?

The gods were laughing at her today, and she couldn't even blame them.

And then, just as she was registering the presence of a fourth body on the far side of the bed, tucked under Sam's arm, she heard the tiniest and probably entirely imagined (and also very familiar) wheeze and--

_No frakking way._

She was _not_ lying in bed with Dee, Sam, _and Lee_ , because that was not a thing that would ever happen in any version of her life.

She needed to get out of here.

She thought she'd managed to slip off the foot of the bed, grab her clothes off the floor, and escape through the hatch unnoticed--but apparently not, because Dee caught up with her halfway to the head. (And it was a damn good thing she'd spent all that time serving on Pegasus two years and a lifetime ago, before it had been blown up rescuing their indigent asses off New Caprica, or she'd have had no idea where the frak she was going and that would have made this entire ridiculous farce of a situation even worse.)

"Kara, wait."

She shrugged Dee's hand off her shoulder. "Gotta whiz."

"Why didn't you use the ensuite?" Then, with a grin, "Perk of being married to the Commander, right?"

She wasn't going near _any of that_. _Ever_. Except that she had just woken up in bed with it, apparently. "Didn't want to disturb you." She handwaved vaguely. "Any of you."

Dee smiled faintly. "You know Lee can sleep through anything, and Sam doesn't care if we wake him."

Of course she did. But how did Dee know anything about Sam's sleeping habits?

Dee's hand was on her arm again, and that was getting really old, really fast. What was Dee playing at here?

"Was it another nightmare about Leoben?"

"No. And it's none of your business."

Dee couldn't have looked more shocked if Kara had slapped her. "Now I know something's wrong. What the hell's got you so tied up in knots?"

"Like you have any reason to care, when you've gone and pulled this stunt."

Dee shot her a glare that projected concern even as it announced that Kara was being an idiot. "I know that look, Kara. I haven't seen it in months, but I know that look. What's going on in your head?"

"I should be the one asking you that question. Is this some kind of joke?"

" _What?_ Is _what_ some kind of joke?" Dee looked confused and so damn sincere--not to mention, so frakking pretty, bedhead and all, and it had been so long since she'd seen Dee sweet and rumpled and post-coital, and she never thought she'd get to see her that way again--that Kara almost, almost wanted to trust her. But.

"All of this! The mock up of Pegasus! The--the sleeping arrangements! The three of you! I can't argue that I don't deserve it. But for the three of you to team up on this, this, what _the frak_ , and I have to say, I don't really see your frakking endgame here."

"I have no idea what you're--Kara, no one's trying to prank you or gang up on you!"

"Sure."

"And what's wrong with the Pegasus?"

"Other than being toaster carnage a year ago?"

"Other than _what_?"

Gods knew she deserved it, but damn, she had never expected this kind of thing from Dee. Dee was supposed to be everything that was pure and kind and way, way too good for the likes of Kara Thrace.

But Dee, these days, had more reason than anyone to want to see Kara served a dose of her own bitter medicine.

"Blown up," Kara told her. "Destroyed. By the Cylons. Leaving New Caprica?"

"Pegasus... wasn't destroyed leaving New Caprica." And there Dee went again, putting her hand on Kara's shoulder, as if this was a thing they did; as if Kara was someone Dee cared about. "Kara--"

"No. Stop." She shrugged off Dee's hand again. "Whatever you're doing, just stop. I'm going to take a shower. Then I'm going to find an empty rack in a duty locker and go back to sleep. And I'm going to wake up in my rack on Galactica and none of this will have happened."

She turned, flapped one hand dismissively, and kept walking. This time, Dee didn't follow.

 

* * *

 

The head was just as spotlessly clean as she remembered, as it should be. Galactica's head would never be shiny like this again, but Galactica had a good forty years on the Beast; forty dirty years of service and war, and there was no scrubbing away that kind of history. The clock above the mirrors read 0450, but even this early a few of the shower stalls were in use, people coming off watch or going on watch in the never-quite-dead of Pegasus's ship night.

Wanting nothing to do with anyone, Kara grabbed a clean towel and flung it and her clothes over the door of the big corner stall at the end of the third row of showers. The hot water didn't begin to wash away how completely frakked this entire hallucination was, but it did chase off the lingering scents of sweat and sex, and replace them with the stink of clean, standard issue, military-grade soap.

It was all situation normal, really. Are things frakked up in Kara Thrace's life? Did she wake up in bed with someone she shouldn't? Check and check.

Situation normal, that is, until heavy footsteps came down the row of showers and stopped very deliberately in front of hers. Damn it.

"Kara?" Sam asked. A few seconds later, she heard his boots drop to the floor and a pair of sleep pants flew over the curtain rail beside hers. "Right. I'm coming in."

She heard the heavy plastic curtain ripple behind her. Then an arm slipped around her waist and pulled her back against warmth, and height, and strength.

"Frak you." She twisted around in Sam's grip, grabbing his wrists to pin them as she shoved him, hard, into the tiled wall of the shower. He huffed out a breath and grinned down at her, tugging against her hands with just enough force to pretend he'd tried to free himself, before seizing her mouth with his.

And, damn it, she didn't want him in her shower--but this was Sam, hot as hell and twice as stubborn, and of course she _wanted_ him. Hands still fixed in place, he arced off the wall, forcing their bodies together, and she could feel him hardening against her thigh as he bit at her mouth and sucked her tongue against his.

Pressing his wrists into the cold tile hard enough for the caulking to leave crisscrossed lines up his forearms--how many times had they done this before, after all, some days she knew the marks they left on each other's bodies better than she knew her own face in the mirror--she yielded to the demand in his kiss and ground herself against him. Hot water slid over her back, soaked her head, sluiced down into both their faces, forcing her to break away from Sam to spit toward the drain.

Sam laughed, and she grinned up at him and then bit his right pec suddenly and viciously enough that he bucked against her and groaned.

She dropped his wrists and backed away.

He stayed where she'd put him, shoulders pressed against the wall, breathing heavily, cock bobbing at more than half-mast. "Dee said you might need someone," he finally said.

"Oh, well, if Dee said."

Sam shot her an unimpressed look that she was reasonably certain she didn't deserve, under the circumstances. "We all know, after what happened to you on New Caprica--"

"This isn't about New Caprica," she spat.

"--after what Leoben put you through--"

"This isn't about Leoben!"

"--we all know it's been hard for you to--"

Ringing in her ears drowned out the rest of his words. Suddenly dizzy, she fumbled for the wall to steady herself. Where was the wall? She felt her palm crash flat against the tile even as she watched her hand _continue through thin air_ \--what the frak, both of those things couldn't be true at once--and she closed her eyes, but that only made the world spin faster. Swallowing against a wave of nausea and the ringing that seemed to only grow louder, she opened them again and tried to maneuver the morpha ampoules with her battered hands and--wait, hold on, _what morpha?_ What the frak was wrong with her hands?

Where was she?

She was struggling to push Leoben off of her, where he'd backed her into a corner on the floor of a raptor's cabin... she was in a grounded raptor. Her hands pulsed with raw, burning pain, and Leoben was crouching over her, backlit by a planet's sun--actual daylight--and he was holding... was that a block of cheese? No, not cheese, a stone, a big chunk of crumbling stone, and he was cradling it like that rock was the answer to every question he'd ever had in the universe.

Because Leoben hugging a hunk of dirt made so much more sense than him holding a block of cheese curds.

Man, it had been a long time since she'd had real cheese.

"It's called the Momus Stone," Leoben said, holding out the rock toward her like an offering.

"Why the frak should I care?" she asked, and Leoben laughed, that deep rumble of knowing laughter that told her he had more and worse planned for her, and then--

She came back to herself in the shower, with Sam supporting her under the suddenly-too-hot spray, his huge hand gentle between her shoulders. She tried to pull away from him but stumbled and nearly fell again, barely catching herself against his chest.

She'd let go of him soon. She really would.

She was Kara frakking Thrace and she didn't need anyone's support.

"What the frak is up with everyone touching me today?" she demanded hoarsely, still leaning against Sam's chest. She shrugged him off but, unlike Dee, found she couldn't dislodge Sam so easily.

"As opposed to any other day?"

"Yes!"

He narrowed his eyes and managed to imply a smirk. "You do realize we live together, right?"

"We do not." She hadn't shared quarters with Sam since New Caprica. Months before the end of New Caprica, in fact; since she'd been surrounded and tagged in the street, since Leoben had locked her up like a toy for his own amusement, since--

Sam stared at her for a moment, nonplussed. Finally he said, carefully, "You remember New Caprica, right?"

When she didn't respond, he continued, "When we got married? The morning after the sod turning."

"Of course I remember," she scoffed. "What kind of question--"

He nodded. "When you proposed to us--"

"When I _what?_ "

"You proposed."

" _To us?_ "

"To the three of us."

"Sam. I proposed to _you_." Just you, she wanted to say. Just you, Sam, I proposed to _you_ , because I was scared and Lee was too close and you were easier. And I am the worst frak-up alive and you deserve so much better, you deserve a better wife than me.

He was nodding, though. "Yes?" he said. "I feel like I'm missing something here."

"Are you telling me I'm in a group marriage _I proposed_ and we all live happily ever after on Pegasus and I'm the only one who knows this _isn't the way things actually went?_ "

"Uh," Sam said. "Yes? Because that's exactly how it went."

Kara thought of the stinking algae planet, thought of the fight she'd just had with Lee; thought of the last time she'd seen Sam, his face quietly resigned as she pulled on her blues and left the duty locker he and some of Galactica's other civilian refugees had made their own.

"Right," she said, reaching for the controls for the hot water so she could dial it down a little. "One of us definitely hit their head at some point here. And it wasn't me."


	2. Chapter 2

Kara and Sam stepped out of the shower to find Dee leaning against the wall, waiting for them.

Eyeing Kara with a certain amount of skepticism, Dee handed Sam his pants and took his towel in exchange. Kara was struck by how easily they moved around each other, the way Dee's eyes slid over Sam's body as if seeing each other naked was an everyday occurrence and not something that _had never happened and never would_.

Nothing could have driven home to Kara with greater immediacy the realization that these were not the people she knew in the configurations she knew them.

"You really don't remember...?" Dee asked carefully, not quite meeting Kara's eyes.

Kara glared at both of them. "I remember everything. I just don't remember it the way Sam does."

"Or I do," Dee said bluntly. "My memory of events is the same as Sam's."

Well, that answered the question of how long Dee had been standing there.

"You think I proposed--" Kara couldn't force the words out past the sudden lump in her throat. "Dee, I would never mess with you like that."

Dee flinched. "Mess with me. Like what?"

"After everything we--" Kara gestured helplessly, giving up hope of finding the right words. "This is ridiculous."

Now Dee was the one glaring at her, and for once Kara didn't quite know what she'd done wrong.

"Gods, Kara," Dee snarled, actually _snarled_ , and Kara had never been so turned on by anyone's anger in her life, except maybe Lee's, and maybe that wasn't the best thing to be thinking about under the circumstances.

"What?" Kara demanded with equal frustration.

Sam kept her from getting in Dee's face with a gentle hand on her arm. "I have a feeling what Kara means by _everything_ doesn't match what the rest of us lived through. Can we take this somewhere a little less fraught than the public showers?"

Dee nodded reluctantly, setting off toward the next row of stalls. "Lee will have a fit if we have another argument in public. Damn it."

"Yeah," Sam agreed. "That was on my mind, too."

Seeming to realize in unison that Kara hadn't moved with them, they turned back-- _like good little Cylons_ , she thought desperately, _good little Cylon copies of the people she knew, who could read each other's minds and finish each other's sentences and hand each other clothing_ \--and gave her simultaneous looks, Dee's of confusion and Sam's of frustration.

"Kara, are you--" Sam started, but Kara exploded before he could get any further.

"What the frak is wrong with the two of you?"

They exchanged a look.

"Kara..." Dee began.

"No."

There was a long moment in which she held Dee's eyes and braced for a fight that... didn't come.

"Come on," Sam said finally. "We're going to sickbay."

"Sickbay?" Kara said skeptically.

"Yes, sickbay. Something's wrong, and I want the doc to check you out. Come on. Put my mind at ease."

"I'm not exactly drowning in better offers," she grunted. "Fine. But only if you get checked out, too."

"Me?" Sam asked incredulously.

"Both of you."

Dee and Sam exchanged another of those looks and it was really, really starting to get on her nerves.

"How about this," Dee said. "Let's see which version of events Doc Cottle remembers, and then we'll ask him to examine whoever remembers things differently."

"Cottle's on board Pegasus?"

They turned matching blank stares on her.

"Yes?" Sam said eventually.

Dee shook her head. "Is he not supposed to be?"

Cottle hadn't ever served on Pegasus, but what did it matter, really, held up against everything else?

Kara shrugged. "Doesn't matter. If we're going to do this, let's do it."

 

* * *

 

Kara hadn't spent much time in Pegasus's sickbay so she couldn't say whether it had changed, but waiting for Cottle to wrap things up with another patient and finally see you sure hadn't. Medical centres were all the same, anyway, whether they were ship- or ground-based. They smelled like a childhood's worth of injuries, like the Cylon breeding farm on Caprica. They smelled like the universe was breaking down around you in impotence and pain.

Or maybe that was just Kara Thrace and her endless and spectacular relationship with dysfunction.

Either way, infirmaries were drab. What she wouldn't give for a cockpit and a wing of Cylon raiders to shoot down. Or a world that made sense.

The world hadn't seemed particularly sane since--if she was honest with herself, since all the way back to Zak's crash. It wasn't so much the shortage of sense that was different now, as the type of nonsense that had started cropping up since they lost the Colonies.

This mess, though, this one took the cake.

Until the next and even more incredible frakking piece of nonsense came her way, of course. When the universe had it in for you, it didn't tend to stop at half measures.

So Kara was all but twitching out of her skin, and Dee and Sam were still communicating with each other in silent, speaking glances, when Lee walked in.

He looked like Lee, almost just like her Lee, and something twisted in Kara's gut. The last time she'd seen Lee, they'd argued in the back of a courier raptor, fighting over whether leaving their spouses was worse than being the cheating bastards they knew they both were. She'd been furious. He'd been all cheekbones and righteousness, stinking of sweat and algae, and even so she'd wanted nothing more than to lick the humidity dripping down his temple and feel the press of his cock inside her.

And the guilt. She wanted that, too, the guilt of knowing that no matter how the universe spun off its axis, one thing remained true: she was never supposed to have Lee Adama.

Now, with Commander's pips on his collar and irritation in every step, cheekbones a little less ridiculous than she was used to, he was still _Lee_ enough to push every one of her buttons while also being... different. He looked solid and confident, marginally broader through the shoulders but still in fighting form, and the whole package was jarring and enticing as frak. Kara didn't know whether she wanted to bottle up her shame and frustration, or hit him, or hit that. Probably all of the above, when it came right down to it.

Because, damn it, he was _Lee_. Her Lee or another Lee; it made no difference, really.

"Godsdamnit," he snapped before she could say a word.

"Lee--" Sam began, but Lee cut him off with a repressive gesture and a frown.

"My three spouses," he all but snarled--and was the ability to glare at several people at once a trait hereditary to the Adama line, Kara wondered, or was it passed along to Fleet Commanders with the badge of rank?--" _My three spouses_ are sitting in sickbay with a sudden medical emergency, and not one of you thinks to inform Pegasus's Commander before I had to hear about it from scuttlebutt in the CIC?"

Kara shook her head and tried not to smile. Now this--Lee Adama spitting mad and ready to tear someone a new one--this was footing she knew well.

"Scuttlebutt on Pegasus must be having a rough day," she said and let her smile slide into a smirk as she looked up at him from her perch on the edge of an exam table. "If we were on Galactica, you'd have been here half an hour ago."

Lee blinked at her in surprise, and she almost cackled. He never did have any kind of poker face.

Finally, he said, "Were you even in sickbay half an hour ago?"

"Half an hour ago," Dee interjected lightly, "some of us were in the public showers, trying not to kill each other."

Lee's eyes narrowed but he settled casually next to Dee on the edge of another bed.

"Why didn't you wake me?" he hissed softly at Dee.

"I didn't know this was going to happen or I would have." Dee tucked her arm through his and Kara froze, watching as Lee leaned into her.

They'd always been beautiful together, Dee and Lee, and as a couple they'd always made sense--of a sort--but Kara couldn't remember the last time they'd looked _right_ together, looked like they fit in each other's lives and made each other better. It was damned strange.

She really wasn't in Caprica City anymore.

"What did I miss?" Lee asked softly, almost in Dee's ear, and she elbowed him away with a smile.

"Nothing," she said. "Only Kara having a nervous breakdown and deciding that the past few years went differently than we all remember them."

"What?" He looked across the gap between hospital beds at Kara. "What does that mean?"

"These two lunatics," Kara sputtered, "were trying to sell me on some fairy tale that--" She couldn't choke the rest out. Not to Lee, of all people.

Sam spoke up in time to save her from making a second attempt at  the words that didn't want to be said. "She doesn't remember. She doesn't believe we're married," he said softly, his eyes on Lee.

"Among other things," Kara added desperately, with a flip of her hand that she really hoped looked less unnatural than it felt. "I remember the Beast being destroyed over New Caprica. And Sam and the Doc were never on her. Not ever."

Lee was staring at her like she'd grown two heads--which might not be worse than what was coming out of her mouth--when Cottle came around a partition, shaking his head.

"It's moments like this," the Doc said, scowling at the room at large, "when I wish you were right about that. Do the four of you think I went to medical school for eight years so that I could be the first to hear every fool idea that crosses one of your minds?"

Kara smirked up at him. "You got something better to do, Doc?"

Cottle snorted. "Get out of my sickbay. The lot of you."

"Done!" Kara slid off of the exam table.

"Kara," Lee snapped.

She almost kept going, but thought better of it before she hit the sickbay door. "Godsdamnit, Lee."

When she turned back, he was glaring at her, of course. "If you'll excuse us for a minute, doctor."

"My pleasure," the doc muttered sarcastically and gestured at an empty room off the main sickbay. "Take as long as you want. Family spats are exactly what my hospital is here for."

Kara rolled her eyes at Cottle's back. "I see the Doc hasn't changed."

Lee pulled the door shut behind them and ignored her. "So what exactly did I miss?"

Kara glanced at Dee, then at Sam, and watched as they did the same. Great, now they had her doing the dubious silent communication thing, too. Frak that.

"You aren't my Lee," she said before she had time to reconsider. Then she winced. "I mean--"

"Not your Lee?" He crossed the room in two strides to wave his left hand in her face. "What's this, then, Kara?"

"Frak. Me." There was something on his ring finger. She didn't want to know, she _really_ didn't want to know, but...

Snatching his hand, she turned it so she could look more closely (and if she twisted his wrist at an awkward angle, well, that was a happy coincidence). The ring turned out to be a plain silver band engraved with god and goddess glyphs--a traditional Caprican group wedding band, nothing fancy, and certainly nothing that screamed the identity of his spouses.

Except that--oh shit--she was wearing an identical ring of her own. She'd noticed it vaguely as a weight on her finger when she was bolting for the showers earlier, but she hadn't let herself think about it, hadn't looked at it closely enough to find out whether it was the pair ring she and Sam had talked about over a year ago on New Caprica, or if--

A glance around the room revealed that Sam and Dee were wearing matching wedding bands, as well.

"Frak."

She realized she was clutching Lee's hand too tightly and recoiled, releasing him and the ring.

Massaging life back into his hand, Lee glanced at Sam. "So what you said earlier about her not remembering--"

"Frak," Kara said again, wishing she had something else to say, literally anything. But she didn't. " _Frak_."

"Right." Lee shook his head. "So I'm not your Lee?"

Sam settled on the edge of the bed. "She says we're not married. Though I'm sure you got that part."

"I may have," Lee agreed with a wry grimace.

Dee leaned thoughtfully against the wall, next to Lee. "She also said that Pegasus was destroyed," she commented. "And that the Doc and Sam weren't supposed to be on board at the time."

Kara shook her head in irritation. "I'm right here, assholes."

"Then you explain it to him," Sam said.

"Frak you."

One of Sam's eyebrows twitched upward. "Well, she's still Kara Thrace."

She barked out a laugh and was startled to hear Dee giggle, as well. By the time they'd both collected themselves, even Lee looked marginally less tense.

"None of us were on Pegasus," Kara felt the need to clarify, "except Dee and Lee. You--" she pointed at Sam aggressively, "--were on New Caprica. With me. And then without me. Since I was stuck in Leoben's fun house when Pegasus bought it giving the rest of us a fighting chance to get off planet."

There was a moment of uncomfortable silence. "What? You do know who Leoben is, don't you?"

Dee said, viciously enough to discomfit even Kara, "We sure do."

Sam was nodding. "Dee pulled you out of his little torture chamber on New Caprica here, too."

" _Dee_ pulled me out?"

"...She didn't, where you come from?"

"No," Kara told him emphatically, "You did, Sam."

"But I was on Pegasus--" he began. Something in her expression must have reminded him of what she'd said earlier and he changed tacks. "--except I never set foot there, where you come from."

"No," she agreed. "You were on New Caprica after the turning."

"I was here, too," he said, nodding. "But then I got pneumonia--"

"Yeah. That happened to us, too."

Lee said, startled, "You got pneumonia?"

"No," Kara told him shortly, knowing he was thinking of her well-earned reputation for invincibility against flu bugs that had taken out nearly every Galactica pilot. " _Sam_ did. Living in the frozen swamps of New Caprica."

Sam nodded. "And you called our marrieds, so Dee came down in the next raptor with meds for me from Pegasus. And when the Cylons hit, she tossed me in the raptor and went to find you."

"And couldn't," Dee said, a world of hurt in those two words. "I couldn't find you. You were just... gone."

 _Again_ , Kara heard unspoken.

Damnit. That had been water under the frakking bridge _years ago_. Before the Cylons. Before _Zak_ , even. Before either of them had a first posting.

And now here she was, supposedly _married to Dee_ , and wasn't that a kick in the head? Dee was the past, and any regrets were long buried. But plainly they weren't buried deep enough.

_Get over it, Thrace. You frakked up, as usual, and someone got hurt because you were an asshole. And so what? It was a long time ago. Dee survived it. She got up again and married Lee. Get your head back in the game._

"That's not how it happened," Kara said aloud, reorienting herself. "At least, not to me."

Dee nodded encouragement, and Kara couldn't take it.

"So what do you think happened?" Lee demanded.

Kara shook her head and rounded on him. "That's the wrong question, Lee. Because if you're not going to believe me, then I'm not going to believe you either, and that brings us back to _why the frak are you all playing this bizarre prank on me?_ And I don't think any of us really want to go there."

Dee had her hands out as if to placate someone. "Kara--"

"Don't you dare," she told Dee. "There's a reason none of the four of us have talked since New Caprica, and it's right here in this room reminding us that, frak it, _none of us_ have our heads in order enough to not _frak each other up just because we can_. Don't think for a minute that I won't lash out at you if you don't deserve it, because I will. Group rings or not."

"Fine," Lee said savagely. "Let's hold each other emotional hostage because we're scared of your temper, then, Kara. Is that what you want?"

"Frak. You." She glared back at him. "None of this is what I want."


	3. Chapter 3

Kara and Lee were still glaring at one another when Doc Cottle opened the door to the tiny private room and let himself in.

"Hey, Doc," Sam greeted him with a sheepish look, and Cottle only shook his head.

"You people need a good therapist, not a doctor."

Kara barked a laugh, and Dee groaned.

"That's where you're wrong, Doc," Lee said severely. "I'm afraid I'm going to have to insist that you examine Kara."

"Is that really--" Sam began to protest. He'd sure changed his tune, and she wondered if it was a reaction to Lee or if it was thanks to something she'd said.

Lee cut him off. "--Necessary, Sam? You know it is."

"It's fine," Kara said grudgingly. "I agreed. Or I would have. _Whichever version of events Cottle remembers_." She rolled her eyes at Dee, who nodded at her approvingly. She didn't want to feel Dee's acknowledgement as a warmth in the centre of her chest but... damn it.

"Doc," Dee asked, still meeting Kara's eyes, "how long have you served on Pegasus?"

Cottle shot Dee one of his patented unimpressed looks, the one Kara was used to him reserving for use on _her_. "Since the evacuation from New Caprica." _Obviously_ was heavily implied, with a heaping dose of _you're all idiots and I don't know why I go along with any of it_.

"And how long has Sam lived on board?"

"You tell me. Since the pneumonia outbreak on the ground? About a year, I'd guess. Are we done playing twenty questions yet?"

"Sure, Doc," Kara told him. "Take me in." She held up both hands as if he was going to put her in cuffs, and his frown deepened.

"Enough with the theatrics. And you," Cottle glared at Lee. "Are you planning to tell me what I'm supposed to be looking for?"

Lee nodded crisply. "Anything abnormal that might be affecting Captain Thrace's memory, or any sign that she might be a Cylon agent."

Stung, she leapt to her feet. "I'm not a toaster, Lee!"

"Let's have Doc Cottle make that assessment."

"You know I can't ID cylons," the Doc said pointedly into the middle of their standoff.

"Well," Lee shrugged, "do what you can. Figure out why my CAG thinks the past two years went differently than the rest of us lived them."

"So now I'm your _CAG_ ," Kara needled him, and was rewarded by Sam elbowing her in the side. "Ow."

"You're my CAG," Lee said severely. "And you're my wife. When you're not being my problem."

Sam snorted. "Classy, Lee."

"Always." He looked around with a grin. "I need to get back to the CIC. Don't the rest of you have places to be?"

Dee shrugged, but Sam glanced at the time and startled. "Frak. I'm flying CAP in 20 minutes."

Kara shook her head, thinking she must have heard wrong. "You're flying CAP?"

"Yes? Why? Is that--am I not a pilot where you come from?"

"You? A viper pilot?"

"Huh. I guess if I'd been stuck on New Caprica during the occupation..."

"Yeah."

"Well, shit." He shrugged. "I still have to go."

"I'll walk you," Lee said.

"All right," Sam agreed. Kara could almost have missed the way his hand crept up Lee's back as they turned toward the door; she almost did miss it, her thoughts churning with Cylon detectors and hospitals and the godsdamn Pegasus--and, really, _what the frak?_

She knew that gesture, the casually possessive and infinitely soothing grip of Sam's hand on her shoulder; how many times had he made that same move on her?

It was frakking weird to see him touch anyone else that way, that was all. Especially when anyone else was _Lee_.

With a last glance back at her, Sam and Lee moved toward the main sickbay doors, heads together, comfortably close.

Kara watched until they were out of sight.

 

* * *

 

Doc Cottle banished Dee to the waiting area while he put Kara through a routine physical, drew blood, and then took x-rays of her old injuries. Midway through the second x-ray of her right hand, he fixed her with a look and grimaced.

"So where exactly do you think you're supposed to be, if not on Pegasus?"

Kara suppressed the urge to shrug and kept her hand steady on the plate. "Galactica."

"You were on Galactica, and then you were here?"

"No. No, I--" She had been--she had definitely been on a raptor, she thought, and then--there had been smoke, something was broken, her hands were bloody and aching and--

No. That wasn't right. She'd been flying a raptor. She'd set down on the algae planet on a delivery run for the Old Man. She'd traded her CAP away to Hot Dog so she could do the stupid milk run and see Lee, but it hadn't gone the way she'd hoped--no thanks to Lee, and his sensibilities about cheating, and his frakking honor. Talk about a bucket of cold water.

Doc Cottle broke into her introspection with an equally cold stethoscope against her arm. "What's the last thing you remember?"

"I was fighting with Lee."

"Must be Tuesday," the Doc muttered. After a long moment, he said, almost gently, "You were fighting with Lee. About?"

"About Sam. And Dee. And whether or not we should divorce them."

His sharp breath was soft enough that she might have missed it if she hadn't been holding her own against the press of the stethoscope to her lower back.

"Not like that. We aren't--we weren't a group. I married Sam on New Caprica, so Lee married Dee, and then I made a mess of everything." Bitterly, she added, "The way I do."

"You aren't the only person around here who makes mistakes," Cottle ground out as he turned away to adjust the x-ray machine.

"No," Kara agreed, "But I'm the very best at it."

 

* * *

 

Neither lab tests nor x-rays turned up anything of note. All the bones she'd ever broken or injured--her fingers, her twice-frakked knees, the childhood break in her left radius--were where they were supposed to be. Nothing in her blood work seemed unusual, either, according to Cottle. Short of Baltar's mythical Cylon detector, there was nothing more to examine her for.

"I can't explain it," the Doc finally told Dee, after muttering over his notes about PTSD and psychotic breaks. "She believes things happened differently around here but I can't find an explanation for it. There's no head trauma and no traceable drugs in her system." He shook his head. "It's a mystery, but she's all yours."

And that, apparently, was that.

"You gonna throw me in hack?" Kara asked as Doc Cottle moved off.

Dee shook her head in silence and made a face that Kara could only interpret as conflicted.

"You're still Pegasus XO, right?"

"Let's go home," Dee said, and Kara didn't have the heart to remind her that Captain's quarters on Pegasus weren't even close to being home.

Hours after most of the crew woke for daytime rotations, Pegasus's halls were still quiet and dim, though there was enough activity for Kara to feel oddly exposed in front of so many familiar faces--many of whom, she knew all too well, had died in the escape from New Caprica. (Or in the weeks before--how the hell would she know the difference? She'd been in Leoben's playroom for weeks. Months? She still wasn't sure.)

It was more than a little uncanny, wandering these hallways of the dead with Dee by her side--and it was less than reassuring that the Doc hadn't been able to find anything wrong with her. But, well, Kara knew damn well she wasn't a Cylon, and how many alternatives did that leave? Mind control? Psychosis?

Both were possibilities that Cottle had seemed skeptical about.

"This isn't how psychosis or schizophrenia typically manifest," he'd said shortly. "If I had team of psychiatrists to refer you to, we'd all be seeing them weekly. The PTSD alone around this place..."

Dee had nodded, the Doc had dubbed her a mystery, and here they were, on their way _home_.

The hatch slid open under Dee's hand, and she followed Dee through the doorway and then just... stopped. Kara hadn't spared a passing thought to what Captain's quarters looked like when the lights were off, but maybe she should have, because she found herself entirely unprepared for how affected she was by stepping into quarters where she clearly lived with Dee, Sam, and Lee.

That was her pathetic collection of poetry books on the shelf in the corner. Sam's ridiculous C-Bucs flag--the one he was always in the middle of repairing but never, ever finished--covered most of the coffee table. And she knew who that set of pips had to belong to--those were all of Lee's various rank pips since the attack on the colonies, sitting in a box on the edge of a dresser.

Frak. This was weird. It was so damn weird.

Swallowing against the lump in her throat, Kara settled heavily on the couch next to the door.

"Dee..."

Dee turned and looked at her with the hint of a smile. "What?"

It was all too much. She didn't know, damn it. What was she supposed to say?

Dee settled into the far end the couch. "What are you tying yourself in knots over now?"

"I'm not," she protested.

"Really." Dee gave her a look reminiscent of the face she used to make back in their academy days when Kara was being insufferably stupid, or insufferably... Kara. Which was a little too on the nose, right now.

"It's nothing. I'm fine."

"You're fine?"

"Yes."

"Is this about the Academy?"

"No!" Kara was most definitely not thinking about CMA, and their short-lived relationship, and how frightened she'd been the night she broke things off with Dee. Not even a little. Because she didn't let herself think about that.

Just because she and Dee had wound up on the same battlestar, and just because that battlestar had been the only one to survive the destruction of civilization as they knew it, didn't mean that she was capable of fixing her past mistakes.

Even the ones that were beautiful and unavoidable. Some things couldn't be fixed once you broke them.

"Kara," Dee said firmly, "I know you don't remember enough to know this, but that's all in the past."

"Is it?"

Dee nodded sharply, twice. "Yes."

"Maybe it isn't in the past for me."

"Of course it isn't, for you." Dee sighed, leaning back against the armrest, and Kara winced. "Look, we've talked about this. You and I have talked. You and Lee have talked. Maybe soon you'll start to remember some of this, but even if you don't... we're all good. Really."

Kara wanted to reject everything, all of it, out of hand, but it had always been hard to say no to Dee--and it was silly to argue, too, when Dee's insight generally had perfect vision.

Still. "I don't know if I believe that's possible," Kara muttered.

Dee laughed. "Well, I didn't say it was easy. But it was possible. We're here, after all."

Kara shrugged, not entirely convinced. Were they here? How could they be? "If you say so. Why would you even ask me about the Academy?"

"Kara. We're married. I know what that squirrelly face means."

"But I don't know you," Kara muttered. _I don't know what I'm doing here and I don't know this life and I don't know this version of you._

"Yes, you do." Dee held out her hand and twitched her fingers at Kara. "Come here."

"What--" Kara looked up, met Dee's affectionate gaze, and realized she had no idea why she was wasting her time asking questions whose answers she already knew.

Maybe she didn't know where the hell she was, or why, or who was frakking with her head--but this was Dee, miraculously hers again through whatever fluke of circumstance or sudden-onset insanity. Was she really going to pass that up?

She was all kinds of frakked up, but she wasn't stupid.

Kara leaned in as Dee buried one hand in her hair and tugged just hard enough to hurt a little, aligning their faces so that the kiss, when it happened, was sweet and perfect and sent shivers up Kara's spine.

Dee slid across the couch and in against Kara's side like it was second nature and then she breathed, wet and hot against Kara's neck, "Is this okay?"

"Yeah," Kara managed, fumbling for Dee's hip and pulling her halfway onto her lap without any grace whatsoever. "Yes, I mean, yes. What're you--"

She leaned forward a fraction of an inch and Dee's lips were there, fierce and sweet and forgiving. Dee's hands on her shoulders, Dee's weight resting on her thighs, Dee's tiny waist between her hands, and she let herself get lost in the kiss for a long, gorgeous moment.

Then Dee pulled away with a smile, and Kara found herself grinning up at her. "Motherfrakker. Is this how this works? Are the boys going to mind?"

"No," Dee laughed. "Well, maybe a little. But only that I got to you first."

"Heh." Throwing open the jacket of Dee's duty blues with irreverent disregard for the condition of her buttons, Kara shoved both hands under Dee's tanks to find skin. "So what you're saying is, we're repeating ancient history. Can't get mad at us for that. All of this has happened before..."

Dee nuzzled into her throat with a chuckle. "I'm sure they'll see it _exactly_ like that."

"Good. Why are we talking? Shut up and kiss me some more."

Against all reason, Dee pulled back and looked her in the eye. "You're sure about this?"

"No," Kara said, and kissed her again.


	4. Chapter 4

Sam walked in while they were still making out on the couch like horny teenagers, and Dee slid gracefully out of Kara's lap and onto the next cushion despite Kara's soft whine of disappointment.

"Glad I'm not interrupting anything," Sam said teasingly, collapsing into the big chair facing the couch and not the gap between the two women, despite Kara's half-formed hope.

"You know me," she told him. "Can't keep my hands off a pretty--"

And there was that weird pressure in her ears again, that buzzing, and why hadn't she mentioned this to Cottle? Oh, yeah. Because if she had, he'd think she was nuts for sure.

And she wasn't, she couldn't be losing her mind--but Leoben had her pinned down on the floor of a battered raptor and her hands were made of pain and, frak it all, she could not shake the bastard off.

"Kara," Leoben said, patiently, as if to a recalcitrant child. "You know me."

She grimaced and tried again to throw him, but without using her hands she couldn't get enough leverage to shift out of the corner where he'd trapped her. And her hands hurt so godsdamn much when she'd been struggling with the medkit earlier that even the thought of using them in a fight made pain lance up her arms.

"I can't tell any of you frakkers apart," she spat.

And she was back on the couch with Dee, staring across the room at Sam, and the words echoed inside her head, _I can't tell any of you frakkers apart--_

Which seemed like something she could have said, but she couldn't remember the time or the context, and somehow it didn't sit right. It didn't _fit_ , the images didn't hold together in her mind when she tried to look at them, and she couldn't remember what had come before it or happened afterward. When had she said that to Leoben? Why?

_I can't tell any of you frakkers apart._

Maybe she had dreamed it?

But it sure didn't feel like a dream.

Sam and Dee were staring at her with matching looks of concern again. Less creepy than before, still annoying as frak. She forced a grin. "What was I saying?"

"What happened? What was that?" Sam asked intently.

She didn't want to meet his eyes. "What was what?"

Sam always saw through her bullshit. "You did that in the shower, too. Went blank and then froze up. What's going on, Kara?"

"Nothing! I'm fine. Everything's fine."

"I'm so convinced."

"You should be!"

Sam glowered. Dee looked between them, pinched and worried. "Did you tell Doc Cottle about this? Whatever this is?"

"There's nothing to tell! I'm fine. Really." If no one's going to believe you anyway, best to just carry on, right? "So when do I get to go back on CAP rotation?"

"Are you serious? You want to talk about CAP rotations when you just froze up on us?" Sam raised both hands skyward. "I'm glad this one's above my pay grade."

"Thanks a lot, Sam," Dee chided. To Kara, she said, "We'll have to talk to Lee. I'm not making that call on my own."

"Gods, it's like you're all actual grownups or something. Where's the drama? The miscommunications? The bitter arguments?"

"We leave those to you," Lee said, stepping through the hatch, and of course he'd say that, and of course they did.

"Frak you."

"You offering? 'Cause that seems like a change of tune from the one you were singing earlier."

Two could play that game. "What if I am?"

"I'd say you'd better get over here and put your cubits where your mouth is."

"And I'd say--" She looked where he'd gestured and choked on a laugh. "How'd you even get a bed that big in here?"

Lee shrugged out of his uniform jacket and laid it beside Dee's on the desk. "It came off the Chrion."

Kara thought of the five-star luxury liner and pondered the implausibility of its crew and passengers being willing to part with an oversized bed out of the kindness of their hearts. "Well, that explains half of the story."

Dee chimed in, "Lee had to bribe three people to get it here."

Kara laughed.

"Before that," Dee added, "we were shoving doubles together and someone always fell in the crack."

Sam sat up in his chair and grimaced. "You mean I always fell in the crack."

Dee shrugged innocently. "Didn't I say that?"

"Nope."

"Funny, 'cause I heard her," Kara said.

Lee shook his head and tried--not very hard, she thought--to suppress a smile.

"Don't you start with me," Sam threatened, grinning at Kara from across the room, and her heart forgot for a second that this wasn't her Sam and that she wasn't supposed to be in love with him.

And then it all crashed painfully down on her again. This wasn't her universe. This wasn't her Sam, or her Dee, or her Lee --

Not that any of them were hers at all any more--

Not that she was going to let that stop her now.

"Yeah, yeah." She shook her head at Sam in fake disappointment. "What're you planning to do about it?"

"Wouldn't you like to know."

"I really would." She gestured at the bed in a deliberately offhand way. "Shall we?"

Lee looked at her as if she'd grown two heads. "Shall we _what_?"

Sam laughed. "Are you seriously suggesting what I think you're suggesting?"

She shrugged. "People keep telling me we're all married, so why the frak not?"

Dee managed to stop giggling for long enough to wave one hand dramatically and announce, "Kara Thrace, ladies and gentlemen."

"Gods," Lee said, sitting heavily on the arm of Sam's chair.

Sam slid his arm around Lee's waist. "You may not be _our_ Kara, but you're still our Kara."

"Am I supposed to be as sappy as the rest of you?" she asked the room at large. "Because that's not going to happen."

Lee snorted. "The rest of us? The only one being sappy here is Sam."

Dee shrugged. "I could probably be persuaded to be sappy, too. If you asked nicely."

Kara could ask nicely. Really, really nicely. But--"Do you think the two of you can handle being sappy with fewer clothes on?"

"Augh." Lee buried his face in his hands. Without a word, Sam shifted in his seat so he could massage Lee's shoulders.

Dee smirked over at Kara and told Lee, "I don't think she asked you, Commander."

Lee groaned again and tucked his chin to give Sam better access to his shoulders. "Et tu, Dee?"

He startled upright when Kara's tee hit the wall behind him and Sam. "What...?"

Sam was laughing, but Lee's eyes narrowed and he frowned at Kara without his gaze dipping below her chin. "Am I the only one here who thinks we should try to figure out a little more about what's going on before we jump in the sack with Kara's doppleganger?"

Kara scoffed. "Or we could do something _fun_."

"Kara..." He was frowning again.

"Fine, fine," she shrugged. "Does that mean I have to put my shirt back on?"

Dee said softly, eyeing Lee, "If nothing else, we still need to make a decision about Kara's flight status."

Oh, no. No, she'd asked about CAP rotations but--"My _flight status_?"

Lee's shoulders rose with tension again, though his expression didn't change. "Damn it."

"Yeah," Dee said.

"What's wrong with my flight status?"

Sam said, "Nothing's wrong with your flight status. Something's wrong with your memory." He stood up and tossed Kara's shirt to her, then turned to Lee. "Should the rest of us clear out for this?"

Lee shook his head. "No, that's all right, Sam." To Dee, he said, "The Old Man's left the decision to you and me. And Kara."

Kara snorted and shrugged the tee back over her head. "Isn't that thoughtful of him!"

"Kara." Dee chided, her eyes following Lee as he started to pace. "You've both seen the Doc's report?"

"I haven't," Kara said.

"You were there for all of it," Dee said, exasperation evident in her tone. "I meant Lee and the Admiral."

Kara knew she shouldn't, but--"What about Sam?"

"Sam can speak for himself," Sam said, folding himself back into his seat. "And I don't need to see the paperwork. It's obvious nothing turned up or you'd still be in sickbay. Or in hack."

"True enough," Kara admitted. "So why can't I keep flying?"

Lee slammed his hand down on the desk as he turned to face her. "Damn it, Kara, you might be a Cylon!"

"But I'm not!"

"Of course you're not," Lee scoffed. "That would be too easy."

"Thanks a lot. Tell me how you really feel, Lee."

"That's not what I meant."

"How about we skip what you meant, and get on with giving me the go-ahead to fly? And maybe a copy of the Beast's CAP rotation."

Dee turned back to Lee and shrugged. "We could ask the Old Man for Helo to step in as CAG? Or we could give CAG to Showboat."

"Showboat is probably the better option," Lee said slowly. "If _someone's_ willing to work with her."

"What?" Kara asked, abruptly realizing every eye in the room was on her. "Showboat's alive? Why wouldn't I work with Showboat?"

"You'd be happy with her as CAG?"

"Sure. Why the frak not?"

"Fine," Lee said, with the manner of someone railroading a decision through before anyone could change their mind. "So we'll demote Kara to pilot status for now, and put Case in as temporary CAG."

"Wait," Kara said. "I'm CAG?"

"You were," Lee said with a grin. "Now you report to Showboat."

"Can't be worse than reporting to you, Apollo."

"It's been a while," he said. "You--wait. If Pegasus was destroyed, you think I'm still CAG? On Galactica?"

"Yes sir, Apollo, sir."

"Huh," he mused. "And we're all still alive?"

"What, the four of us? Sure."

Lee looked her in the eye and said, seriously, "I don't think you're a Cylon agent, Kara."

Dee and Sam were muttering to each other at the far end of the couch, but Kara couldn't quite make out what they were saying. She shrugged at Lee. "Eh."

Lee never could take a hint. "Seriously. I want you to know that."

"It's fine. Really."

"Glad to hear it," Lee said, his tone shifting to slyly teasing. "Because you're flying CAP at ass o'clock tomorrow."

"Perfect. I'm so glad no one thinks I'm a Cylon."

Lee nodded. "I'm still not going to sleep with you tonight."

Stung, Kara snapped, "Why the frak not?"

"Kara. You're not..."

"Not what?"

"Not in possession of all your faculties. You can't possibly think I'd--"

"Do you always have to be so goddamned moral, Lee?"

Sam's sigh fell loudly in the charged silence. Kara glanced up to see Dee shaking her head.

"I guess so," Lee said eventually, looking like he wanted to say something very different.

"Fine," Kara snapped. "I'll go find myself a rack."

Lee grabbed her arm before she was halfway to the door. "Frak's sake, Kara, you don't have to go anywhere."

"It sounds like I do, since you apparently don't trust me."

"Can the two of you--" Sam began, only to be stopped by Dee.

Still gripping Kara's arm, Lee told her, "I didn't say I don't trust you."

She wanted to fling his hand away but didn't. "That's funny, 'cause I could have sworn--"

"That wasn't what I meant," he snapped, vicious and familiar. Some small, petty part of her was glad that she'd managed to provoke him. This, she could do. This Lee, she knew how to navigate. Then he said, "Maybe _you_ shouldn't trust _us_."

She pulled her arm away. "Gods damn it, Lee."

"Can we all just take this down a few?" Sam asked the tense room.

"No," Kara told him, never taking her eyes from Lee. "We really can't."

"Where are you going to go, Kara?" Dee asked softly.

"I'm sure there's a duty locker somewhere with a spare rack." As an afterthought, she added, "Or a still someone's hiding behind an engine somewhere."

"They're not hiding it very well if they let the Commander's wife in on it," Dee pointed out with a belated wince at her own words.

Kara gritted her teeth, threw open the hatch, and stepped through. "Ask me how much I don't frakking care."

 

* * *

 

An hour later--two hours later?--Kara was too buzzed to care how many hours later, and she wasn't sure why she'd stormed out, either. Had she really walked out on Dee and Sam and whatever else was going on just because Lee hadn't wanted to frak her?

Of course she had. She was drunk, not delusional.

The corridor wobbled haphazardly. She put a hand to the bulkhead to steady herself as the deck heaved under her feet, and damn. Laird's moonshine really packed a punch.

She was going to remember that and find out if her Laird had a still tucked away on Galactica. Assuming she ever got back home to where she belonged.

Speaking of which, this corridor was definitely not where she belonged.

Where the frak was she, anyway?

Oh.

The door looked like every other door on a Mercury class battlestar--a recessed circle, painted a dark bullet grey that was nearly black, and _definitely a bad idea, Kara_.

They were probably already asleep. She could sneak in. No one would even notice she was there. She could slip back into bed where she'd woken up this morning, and fall asleep, and when she opened her eyes again she'd be in her own rack in her own locker on Galactica and--

This really was the worst idea ever.

Still, she found herself clinging to the latch as she turned it slowly, silently, and crept inside, easing the hatch shut behind her.

They'd left it unlocked, after all. She wasn't doing anything wrong if they'd left the hatch undogged for her. That was practically an engraved invitation.

There was an emergency light in the corner of the ceiling, but her eyes were still blinded from the corridor as she fumbled her way toward the bed and--oh.

She hadn't been wrong. They were all three asleep, with Dee sandwiched in the middle this time, Sam's arm thrown across her waist. Lee lay on his side, curled in toward the other two, his legs tangled up with Dee's.

Kara tripped against the edge of the couch, of course, because she was watching the three shapes in the bed and not looking where she was going. _Rookie mistake, Thrace._ Even drunk, she knew better. The couch slid an inch, scraping the floor as it went, and Kara grabbed at the arm and refrained from cursing even as she eyed the bed with self-castigating paranoia.

Sam didn't even twitch, but Dee shivered in her sleep at the sound, her shoulder swinging up to bump Lee in the face--and of course Lee woke up.

Gods damn it all.

"You came back," Lee said softly.

"Yeah," Kara managed, clinging to the back of couch.

He smiled, sleepy and soft. "I'm glad."

"I'm--" she tried to make her way around the couch, stumbled again, and caught herself on a bulkhead. "I'm drunk."

"Come here," Lee said, and shifted over to make room for her in the ludicrously enormous bed.

"No, don't--" she tried to say, but it was too late. He'd already bumped Dee, who muttered something into Sam's arm as she shifted; and because nothing could ever be simple, Sam blinked blearily awake and pulled Dee in against his chest.

"Whuh?" he muttered inarticulately.

"Kara came back," Lee told him. "Go back to sleep."

"Good," Sam muttered, turning his face into Dee's hair.

Lee gestured again to Kara. "C'm'ere."

Frozen, she stared at him and wondered when Lee had become one of the things she was most afraid of in the universe. "I don't--"

"Frak's sake, Kara," he muttered. "What are you doing here if you're not coming to bed?"

"I'm coming to bed," she conceded gracelessly after a fraught moment. "It's just--"

She dropped her shoes at the side of the bed and half of her clothes on top of them, then crawled onto the bed still wearing the other half.

Whatever, no one in this room was going to hold it against her.

And she had no idea which drawers in which dressers held sleep clothes, much less hers.

Lee slid toward her, and she found herself turning over and leaning back against his chest before her mind had caught up to her body. She forced herself to breathe deeply and not to stiffen up in his arms.

"Do you still have your blue dress?" Lee mumbled sleepily into her ear.

"My blue dress?"

"Yeah. The one with the--" He gestured across her collarbones and over one shoulder. He was ridiculous, and if she hadn't already known which dress he meant she could never have made sense of the gesture. Fortunately for him, she knew it even before he said, "The one you wore on Colonial Day."

"Lost it on New Caprica," she muttered.

"Oh. Our Kara did, too."

"Gods, Lee--" Sam muttered from the other side of the bed, and Kara ran her hand soothingly down Lee's arm because she couldn't get to Sam.

"It's all right," she told Sam carefully. "I don't mind."

"You shouldn't mind," Lee muttered into his pillow. "You looked frakking amazing in that dress. You looked like an angel--an avenging angel, Kara, hand to the gods. I would have--I wanted to--it's a shame you lost that dress. That's all."

"That's all," Sam snickered. "Man. You're obsessed."

"Sam, seriously, have you seen Kara in that dress?"

Sam sighed. "Yes, Lee, we all know about the blue dress."

"I don't," Kara pointed out innocently enough, starting to float toward something hazy and sweet and maybe even peaceful.

While spooning with Lee in a giant, impossible bed which also held Sam and Dee.

"Augh," Sam grumbled at her, and Lee snickered.

Nope, still absurd.

Kara let herself drift.


	5. Chapter 5

Frak, frak, frak.

Sure, Lee and Dee had given the go-ahead for her to fly CAP, and she'd rather be outside Pegasus and doing something than shut up in Commander's quarters--or stuck elsewhere on the ship like deadweight--but none of that made flying feel right and natural and _normal_ the way it should.

She'd been out in this viper, her viper, hundreds of times, maybe thousands. It didn't matter that she wasn't in the right--universe? Timeline? Whatever the frak had changed between here and home, her viper hadn't. The pressure valve on the left steering control was still tacky, and her fingerprints were all but smudged across the dashboard. Even the bright green dial she'd found to replace the old cracked one on the DRADIS panel was just as mismatched as she'd left it, back home.

Kara could fly CAP rotations in her sleep if she had to--some days, she could swear she had run whole briefings without waking up. And yet. Here she was, frakking up other pilots' DRADIS passes because she couldn't stop thinking about parallel universes and her frakking spouses (still an incomprehensible word, by the way) and--frak it, this mess was really throwing her off her game.

If she couldn't get her head together, she knew she shouldn't be in a viper, and damned if she was going to force Dee and Lee to make that call for her.

Frak it. Of course she was going to force them to make the call, because she was an asshole who couldn't get anything right and deserved nothing good in her life, and even strange versions of the people she loved who'd been stupid enough to hitch themselves to her personal disaster weren't going to be exempt from the destruction she'd lead to their door just by being here.

Maybe that other Kara Thrace, the one who belonged in this universe, had been better than that. Maybe she'd figured out how to deserve good things and stop hurting everyone who got too close.

 But Kara sure as frak didn't know how.

A quiet CAP gave her too much time to think. What she wouldn't give right now for a couple of Cylon raiders to shoot down. Even a basestar wouldn't go amiss. _Some kind of action, any action. Please._

The gods didn't oblige.

Well, maybe not _any_ kind. Speaking of calling down disaster on the people she loved.

What if she couldn't get home? What was she going to do with Dee and Sam and Lee and their frakking _group rings_ and their anxious eyes and casual affection and that big, ridiculous bed and--

And how the hell had this version of her ever faced the Admiral after she'd married his son? The wrong son, no less, and an entire frakking quad of other people?

She couldn't begin to imagine how that conversation must have gone.

She was jolted out of her thoughts--"Starbuck, Pegasus. Come in, Starbuck." --by Hoshi's voice rasping out of the old wireless.

Kara keyed her signal live. "It's so quiet out here we thought you'd fallen asleep on us, Pegasus. We were waiting to hear you start snoring."

"Negative, Starbuck," Hoshi said. Well, he wasn't Dee, that's for sure. "Blue section are currently departing launch tubes. Red section is cleared for return. Bring your birds home. Please confirm."

Kara sighed before thumbing the wireless live again. "Coming in, Pegasus. Kat, Narcho, on me."

As Narcho and Kat (frakking Kat, and wasn't that a kick in the teeth) slid into formation behind her, Kara tried not to think about how it should have been Dee's voice on the wireless calling her home and not Hoshi's. Dee's voice, a beacon of light in the infinite dark.

Of course it hadn't always been Dee on comms. Everyone's favourite wireless tech still needed to sleep. It was an imperfect illusion that left Galactica's pilots with the impression that Dee was always there, the voice in their ears, chasing off the silence when you were lost in the black. Lieutenant Dualla, calmly competent Dee, always there and always calling you home.

It felt wrong not to hear Dee's voice--a visceral reminder that Kara wasn't home and that this wasn't her life. Everything had been twisted sideways on New Caprica, and she'd frakked up so badly since, and if it had just been Dee's voice in her ear on this CAP--but this version of Dee was Pegasus XO. Dee wasn't in her ear, she was in Kara's bed and in her impossible marriage, and _none of this was right_.

Or maybe it was too right, too close to perfect. Kara knew, the way she knew her viper or that the sky was blue--she knew she could never have done anything to deserve the kind of safety she felt in falling asleep and waking up in that impossible, warm bed. Next to Lee, and Sam, and _Dee_.

Dee, who she had walked away from years ago. Dee, who she maybe could have loved if she hadn't been too much of a coward and a walking disaster to have ever made it work.

When she'd met Zak, a couple years after Dee, everything had been different. She'd never been afraid of breaking Zak the way she'd been scared of hurting Dee, because Zak had already been damaged, like Kara; already living in the shadow of two men he hated and loved. Kara knew what that life was like. She knew how it tasted. She knew she couldn't break him because he was already broken, like her.

 Dee had been different. Dee had deserved more. Had deserved better than a frak-up like Kara Thrace.

There was a reason Kara had steered clear of innocents, of good people, since Dee. Kara didn't want anyone's pain on her conscience, so she'd kept things simple. Flirt, fight, frak, sure, but don't love. Love was for people who deserved good things. Love was for people like Dee. (Dee probably believed in romance. She seemed the type.)

And then Zak had happened. And then Sam. And Lee. And frak everyone and everything because Kara's life was such a mess that it was obviously unfixable but...

Here it was, fixed.

And if Dee was the missing piece that had made her transformer fire of a mess with Lee and Sam actually work...

Well, frak. Because wonderful people, beautiful fragile whole people, weren't for the likes of Kara. She would only break everything and bring them all down.

 

* * *

 

When she got back to quarters--three days of this and she still couldn't bring herself to think of them as _her_ quarters or, even worse, _their_ quarters--Lee was sitting in the middle of the outlandish bed, flimsies and books spread out around him like some kind of domestic bureaucratic debris field.

 She stopped just past the door and glared at him. "Thought you were supposed to be in the CIC?"

"Duty roster's swapped around this week," he said absently, not looking up from a stack of flimsies. "Dee's in command."

She could go back to the flight deck, she thought. Someone's viper would be up for repairs, they always were. Nobody would scoff at an extra pair of hands or expect more from her than the ability to poke at a flight train without making a problem worse.

And if that didn't pan out, there were other places she could lurk. Pegagus's Memorial Hallway would never rival Galactica's, but it was still a good place to go if you wanted to be left alone with your thoughts.

Lee looked up while she was still standing in the doorway, deciding where to bolt to. "Is something wrong?"

"No."

His brows shot up, and she knew she'd been made. "So that's a yes?"

"...Yes."

"Come here." He set down his papers and held out a hand in a gesture that looked comfortable, commanding, and distinctly _wrong_ on Lee, who was never so casual with affection. She didn't want to ignore him, but she didn't want to let him order her around, either. The age-old dilemma.

Meeting his eyes, she lowered her ass slowly into one of the chairs near the door.

Lee lifted his brows but didn't get up from the bed or comment on her laughable rebellion.

"So what's the problem?" he asked calmly, setting aside the flimsies he'd been paging through when she walked in.

She shook her head. "Nothing. Except that I don't belong here."

"Huh," he said. "Here in this version of the past two years? Here on Pegasus? Or do you mean here, in this room, with me?"

"Yes."

"Kara Thrace, wordsmith," he said sarcastically, and Kara couldn't help but grin at him.

"Frak you."

"Here we go again," he said tauntingly, and she really did want nothing more than to knock him back onto the bed, crawl on top of him, and let their bodies do what bodies did best--buy them both a hasty escape from everything that was frakked in the universe. But she knew Lee like she knew her own viper dash, and that wasn't what he wanted.

"What do you expect me to say, Lee?"

"What do I expect you to say?" He blinked, thinking it through. "Anything. Just don't shut me out again."

"Don't shut you out--damn it, Lee. I can't shut you out _again_ because I don't know the last time I did it. Because _that wasn't me_ and this isn't the way things were supposed to go."

"Who knows?" he taunted. "Maybe this is exactly how things were meant to go."

Through gritted teeth, she managed to say, "Not. Helping."

"I know," he said softly. "I wish I could, though."

"You can't. Because I'm a frakked up mess."

"You're not a mess." At her raised eyebrow, he amended that to, "Not the only mess, anyway. We're all wrecks and derelicts around here."

She shook her head, not wanting to argue the point, and stood up from her chair. "I should go."

"Stay," he said, and she'd taken a step toward him before she realized it. "Don't run off this time."

She made herself stop at the edge of the bed, her knees just grazing the edge of the mattress. She glanced down at where the wedding band gleamed on his left hand. She'd taken hers off. If she couldn't remember the ceremony, she'd told herself, she shouldn't be wearing the ring.

She had very nearly left it on top of the dresser that morning, but then she'd stuffed it in a pocket without giving herself time to think about why. "I'm not running."

"Then stay."

She shook her head. "Lee. I can't. I'm going to ruin everything good you have going on here."

He laughed almost silently under his breath. "You can't." He took one of her hands in his and she suppressed a shiver at the warmth of his calloused palm, the smooth bite of the ring. "You think we haven't had that argument before?"

"Have we?"

"Dozens of times."

"Damn it, Lee."

"I love you, Kara Thrace," he said and she pulled her hand away, feeling like someone had kicked her in the stomach. The last time Lee had said he loved her-- "And I know you love me. Even in some other universe where we frakked up completely, I know you still loved me."

Well, he wasn't wrong.

Not that it changed anything. "I've got to go."

"You proposed to us, you know."

She couldn't meet his eyes. "Sam told me."

"On New Caprica, the day after the turning."

Some things had stayed the same. She knew that much already, but she held her breath and braced against whatever he might say next.

"We woke up in a field, the one where you and Sam were talking about building a house, and you said--"

"No."

Miraculously, Lee stopped talking. He sighed. "All right."

Kara looked up at the ceiling, knowing there was no point in praying for strength. No matter how strong she was, Lee would always be able to find the chinks in her defenses and tear her open. "Godsdamnit. Just frakking tell me, then."

He grinned. "You're sure you want to hear this?"

She grimaced at him.

"All right, all right. You said--" He paused and thought for a moment. "You said, _Let's go_ , or _Come on_ , or something like that. I was half asleep, I don't know what you said. But I asked where and you said, _To the river, to get married_."

Kara choked. He couldn't have known.

Her Lee didn't know.

That was what she'd said when she'd woken Sam.

"And while I was still sitting there thinking you were crazy, Sam started spitballing how it all could work, and Dee said _okay_. And that was that."  He shrugged and smiled up at her almost bashfully. "I know better than to gainsay Dee."

Kara could picture it all too easily, the four of them waking up to the most awkward morning after ever; herself scrambling to save face and pulling a Starbuck special out of her ass and then watching it morph into a minor miracle.

That she could imagine it so easily said something disturbing about either her frame of mind or this universe's perplexing wholesomeness. Either way, she wasn't about to examine it too closely.

Into her silence, Lee reached out and took her hands again. "I know you don't remember any of that," he said. "I know it didn't happen for you. But it happened to me. It got us here. And as crazy as this sounds, as long as the four of us are willing to be there for each other, then I think we can make this work."

"Damn it, Lee," she muttered. Despite herself, she mirrored him, leaning in as he shifted toward her between the stacks of flimsies. She knelt onto the bed, sliding forward until her fingers found their way to Lee's shoulders. She felt his hands slip to her waist and tug her toward him, and then she was leaning into him and it was--well.

Kissing Lee had always been like coming home: It fit like nothing else ever did and it hurt like hell.

His body against hers was an anchor; he was gravity and she was falling into him, and it was the same as ever except _for once_ _it didn't hurt_.

She broke away with a gasp.

It didn't feel wrong, and it didn't feel strange.

Lee had always been forbidden fruit, six seeds from a pomegranate, cursed but unavoidable. He was her fiance's skirt-chasing brother--and then her _dead_ fiance's brother. Her CO's son, her CO himself once he was made CAG; her college ex's boyfriend, her ex's godsdamn _husband_ once he and Dee got married... it never ended. She could list a dozen reasons off the top of her head for why Lee Adama was and always would be off limits to one Kara Thrace.

There were no happy endings for people like her and Lee. Separately or together, they were too frakked up to do right for themselves and too bent to want something that wasn't frakked from the start.

The really twisted part of this thing between them wasn't even that they kept falling together and apart, hurting themselves and each other and anyone else in their vicinity. It was the way they got off on it, the way the poison at the bottom of the cup made them want to drink, and drink, and drown themselves and each other in it.

And here was a version of Lee who was less broken and _not_ forbidden--who was _hers_ , her husband, for frak's sake. The guilt and shame and spiralling that had always been inherent in wanting Lee was gone, and somehow, against all expectations, _she still wanted him_. She wanted _this_. She wanted what they had here, in this bizarro universe where she could wake up next to Dee, and Sam would follow her to the showers in the middle of the night, and kissing Lee didn't hurt.

Somehow, in this ridiculous universe where the four of them worked their shit out and were preposterously, _absurdly_ , happy, she and Lee had managed not to be broken together, either.

She wanted it so frakking much, and that wasn't allowed at all.

She grabbed his head in both hands, reeled herself into him, and kissed him again.

It was good. It was sweet. He brought his hands up to her face and kissed like her Lee might, if he'd been a little less scared of losing her. She could almost let herself get used to this. She could almost, almost imagine a version of her life where everything she wanted was possible.

For a moment, a brief moment, it was good.

...and she remembered. 

_She remembered._

Remembered being shot down by a bunch of chromejobs just as she hit the north valley, the raptor's dash bursting into flames as the avionics objected to Kara's skin-of-her-teeth landing.

Remembered Leoben crouching over her, holding a big, ragged chunk of red sandstone and muttering something guttural that might as well have been a made-up language, because it sounded like nothing she'd ever heard before.

Remembered the fierce burn of her hands lessening to a dull ache as smoke poured out of the stone, through the disabled raptor's cabin, out the open port-side door and into the blazing sun and heat of the algae planet.

Remembered twisting her head to glare at Leoben as she coughed on smoke--and to eye the dropped vials of morpha that she'd fumbled in her haste to pull her gun on him. Little good that had done her.

Remembered Leoben overpowering her so easily she almost sobbed against him in shame. After all the times she'd killed him, to be reduced to this--

Godsdamnit.

No, she didn't want this, she didn't want to be here, trapped in a godsdamn crashed raptor, hands bloody and scorched through her gloves, Leoben looming over her and everything reeking of smoke and frakking algae--

She reached for the memory of the massive bed under her shins, of stupid Pegasus and of Lee's fingers on her cheek, but all she could feel was the grimy sweat of the stinking algae planet, the rasp of smoke in her lungs; and impotent rage, and Leoben's smile, and pain.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're thinking that Kara's proposal sounds familiar: yes, I did. I stole it (with permission) from Saathi1013's [Ephemerides](http://archiveofourown.org/series/41303). I have no regrets. :D


	6. Chapter 6

She remembered.

_She remembered._

"Are you the same Leoben who frakked with my head on New Caprica?" she'd asked him as he pinned her to the floor of the flight cabin and smiled cheerfully down at her, redolent of sweat and incense.

"Kara," Leoben said patiently, as if to a recalcitrant child. "You know me."

She grimaced and tried again to throw him, but without the use of her hands she couldn't manage to buck him off. And her fingers hurt so much from struggling with the medkit that even the thought of using them in a fight made pain lance up her arms.

"I can't tell any of you frakkers apart," she spat, holding her hands out from her sides.

"You're lying, Kara. And you're not very good at it."

"I don't need to be," she told him sweetly, "when I can just kill you again."

"I'm not sure you're up to that today," he said dryly. "Besides, you have more important things to do."

Reaching into a pouch slung across his back, he withdrew a ragged piece of sandstone bigger than both forearms and eyed her expectantly.

She wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of hearing her ask.

"It's called the Momus Stone," Leoben said eventually, lifting the stone to hold it against her breastbone and pin her to the wall.

"Why the frak should I care?" she asked shakily, every word forcing her breasts into either Leoben's hands or the ugly hunk of stone.

He laughed. "Oh, Kara. You'll care soon enough. You've heard of Momus."

"No."

"So many lies," he scoffed affectionately. "But you'll be able to quit lying to yourself soon."

She kicked out at him, and he reacted by sitting on her legs.

"Momus has mostly been forgotten, now," he said patiently, "though of course your mother would have known of him and told you. A millennium ago, he was revered as the god of mischief... and of mistakes. The legends say that through this stone, Momus can open your eyes and show you the error of your ways."

"And what error is that?" she snapped. "My entire frakking life?"

"I guess that's for Momus to know, and you to find out." He grinned and a shiver went up her spine. Nothing that made any Leoben smile like that would be good news for her. "Though I have my, hmm, _theories_ on where you went wrong, you know."

"Where I went wrong," she raged, struggling against his unmoving weight on her legs and the pressure against her chest, "was in ever listening to your bullshit innuendoes and not putting you straight out an airlock the first time I met one of you sons of bitches."

"Where you went wrong," he challenged, still smiling benevolently down at her, "was in deviating from the will of the gods."

Then he started muttering--weird, nasal sounds that she thought she might be hallucinating through the burning pain in her hands. As his pitch slid into almost musical glides and guttural stops, she couldn't deny that it sounded like language, even if it wasn't one she'd ever heard before. Or maybe he was making up his own as he went along. _Leobens._ You just never knew.

And then Kara twitched in surprise, because, holy frak, there was smoke _coming out of the stone_ \--a sharp, fragrant smoke that stung her eyes and cleared her sinuses, that stole over her senses and dulled the throbbing in her hands.

Her relief was short-lived, as Leoben pressed her back into the wall behind her and held the stone--and its acidic fumes--up to her face, all the while speaking in tongues and gazing into her eyes tauntingly--no, lovingly--

She twisted to pull away from the smoke, fighting the creeping fatigue that stole over her body. "I'm not going to wake up from some vision and magically love you," she declared, half incoherent with rage, and distant pain, and the smoke she'd been forced to inhale.

"You keep telling yourself that." He shook his head. "On second thought, forget all about it. You don't need to remember any of this while you're having your eyes opened to your true path. Afterward, I'll be here, and we can start on fate's next chapter for you. Together."

"Frak you," she managed as she slid toward oblivion.

The last thing she heard was his laughter, fading away into echoes that rattled inside her skull with a soft, percussive purr and a soothing rumble.

And then down into warmth, and softness, and waking up to the curve of Dee's spine and that familiar birthmark on one perfect shoulder blade--

 

* * *

 

She came back to herself with a physical jolt, staring into the wide untarnished blue of Lee's eyes, the warmth of his lips still pressed to hers.

Kara pulled away and they stared at each other for a moment in shock.

It hadn't been her imagination. It hadn't been in her head. All of it had been real--the algae planet, Leoben, the crashed raptor, the stone, the hallucinogenic smoke--

The vision.

Gods.

When she glanced up again, Lee looked as shaken as if he--No. He couldn't have seen.

As if he had witnessed everything she had just--

"Did you see that?" she demanded.

"Yes."

"I was right," she said too loudly, incredulous and vindicated. "All of this--none of this is real."

Lee met her eyes and she watched microexpressions chase each other across his face: shock, confusion, resolve. "You mean _I'm_ not real."

"No. Lee--"

"Kara," he said, reaching out and taking her hands again. "Listen to me. Whatever happens, I believe in you. You can do this."

No. No. She couldn't.

"It's okay," Lee said--Lee her husband, Lee who wasn't-- "I'm not real, but you are. I believe in you."

"Lee..."

Lee was gone.

Commander's quarters, Lee's piles of flimsies, the stupidly huge bed--all gone.

Pegasus was gone.

 

* * *

 

Kara was pinned down in the flight cabin of a smoke-filled raptor, and this time it wasn't memory. It wasn't a vision.

Lee, the Pegasus, the past three days--it had all been a lie. She had spent all of that time, or maybe no time at all, grounded in a crashed raptor and trapped inside her head. Leoben had sent her there, into that perfect dream, and she had forgotten--

This, though, this wasn't imaginary. It was ugly, and horrible, and it was real.

Leoben was sitting on her legs, holding her down with a godsdamn hunk of rock pressed to her chest, and her hands hurt like frakking hell.

The open hydraulic door behind him gaped onto an acrid field of brush and algae. The sun pounded down, hot and fierce through the fog of smoke that had stopped pouring from the stone.

Leoben grinned at her in gleeful anticipation.

If she'd had more energy, she would've thrown up on the bastard's smirking toaster face. Lacking the gag reflex but not the bile, she spat on him instead. "Go to hell."

"You coming with me?" he drawled, and Kara was trying to find some kind of leverage so she could headbutt him without braining herself on the rock on her chest, when the percussive blast of weapons fire rang out: two shots so sudden that Kara wasn't sure she had really heard them--

And Leoben flew off of her and clear across the cabin, eyes widening in shock as he spun, face first, into a bulkhead. He dropped to the floor, neck bent at an impossible angle, and Kara found herself staring down at a pool of blood that spread slowly from the bullet wounds in his side.

Leobens always bled more than you expected.

She dragged her gaze from Leoben's corpse and peered across the smoke-filled raptor cabin toward the open hatch. The smoke was starting to dissipate, and she thought--if her senses were to be trusted--that the angle of the light outside hadn't changed since Leoben had got the drop on her. She couldn't have been knocked out long after all--her injuries felt fresh, and that meant Leoben probably hadn't been crouched over her unconscious body for three days.

Three godsdamn days that had never happened.

But whoever had shot Leoben off her was still out there. Kara grabbed for her weapon before she remembered Leoben kicking it across the cabin, three days ago. Earlier today. Before he'd pinned her down with that rock--wait. Where the frak was the stone?

Her eyes flicked from one corner of the cabin to another, to her lap, then around the cabin again. It couldn't have disappeared. The stone had been real, even if nothing else was. She'd felt its weight on her chest. She'd touched it. It had been real. It had to be here.

Finally, she spotted it under Leoben's body, covered in his blood. Well, that seemed fitting, at least.

Movement in the shadow of the hydraulic door caught her eye, and maybe it was just air currents cycling through the smoke, but--no, there was someone out there, the person--or maybe toaster--who'd shot Leoben. Whoever it was, they were armed, and she couldn't be sure they weren't coming for her next.

The wind started to pick up outside, shifting the smoke around enough for her to catch a glimpse of the brush where she'd made her emergency landing. She'd razed a trail of charred grass and wildflowers as she came down, and--there. For a second, before the haze settled back over the raptor's open hatch, she saw a slight figure lean around the corner of the airlock seal.

 _Dee_ , her smoke- and vision-addled brain supplied.

Not frakking likely.

It _could_ have been Dee. Or it could have been Athena, or another Sharon, or anyone with a slight enough build and some serious ability with a weapon. Dee was the least likely possibility on an almost infinite list, and Kara's brain needed to get over the last three _completely fictional_ days and remember to prioritize survival over fantasy.

Kara didn't have a weapon, she didn't have time to find one, and she couldn't afford to wait for whoever the frak it was to be able to see clearly enough through the smoke to shoot again. She needed to move _now_.

Only one angle of approach, really.

Pushing off against the wall with her shoulders to spare her burnt hands, she forced herself upright. The flight cabin spun for a moment and she leaned her elbow against a bulkhead while she caught her balance.

All right. Before the cloud of smoke under the hydraulic door could disperse, she launched herself at the shooter's last position.

She'd meant to pin them before they could fire off another shot, but the wind wasn't with her and the diminutive figure must have seen her coming; it dodged, slight and fast. Even so, Kara might have taken the bastard down with sheer momentum--except that the shooter's unexpected dodge bounced Kara straight off the idiot's shoulder and over the lip of the raptor's ramp. She tried to tuck and roll but still caught part of her weight on her right hand as she hit the ground, and frak if it didn't hurt like a motherfrakker.

Well, that plan certainly backfired.

Kara lay on her back in the dirt, blinking into the sudden glare of direct sunlight and panting with no small amount of pain up at--

Oh, gods. It _was_ Dee.

"Son of a bitch," she managed, still winded from the fall. "Dee, why the hell didn't you sing out?"

"Glad to see you, too," Dee said sharply, and Kara couldn't really begrudge her tone after she'd just tried to tackle Dee off the side of a raptor. She reached out to pull Kara to her feet, but her eyes dropped to the mess of Kara's hands and she seamlessly moved forward instead to lever her shoulder under Kara's arm and prop her upright. "Come on."

They were halfway back to the raptor when Kara blurted, intelligently, "Lee sent you."

"Yep," Dee snapped, still supporting most of Kara's weight. "My husband ordered me here to risk my life for yours. And that's what I'm going to--mmph--"

It wasn't that she'd wanted to shut Dee up, exactly. But Dee had godsdamn shot Leoben through a raptor full of smoke, and then flung Kara straight off that same raptor's hydraulics and onto her ass on the algae-covered ground--and damn if it wasn't impossibly hot.

So Kara did the stupid thing, of course. She kissed her.

Stupid, stupid. What was she thinking? Like this could ever end well.

'Course, she was probably losing her mind again, because she could swear Dee _was kissing her back_.

It was nothing like Kara remembered. Dee had always been fierce, even in their college days, but she had also been sweet and shy and (as it turned out, frak it all to hell) painfully innocent, and this kiss was nothing like that. Nor was it much like kissing Pegasus-Dee, warm and soft and strange. This was--well.

Kara may have started it, but within seconds she had lost control of anything: Dee shoved Kara back into the side of the raptor, her tongue in Kara's mouth, hands on Kara's shoulders, her back, her ass. Never one to be overpowered by anyone's presumption, Kara pushed back, biting at Dee's lips and forcing her hips against Dee's--only to find herself pinned as Dee shoved Kara's thighs apart and forced one of her legs between them.

It was hot, and fierce, and painful--or was that Kara's frakked up hands?--and Kara never wanted it to end.

So of course Dee tore away almost as quickly as she had thrown Kara up against the raptor, pulling back and frowning angrily up at Kara. " _The frak_ is wrong with you?"

"We were married, Dee!"

The look Dee gave her was--well, Kara couldn't exactly blame her.

"I know it sounds crazy!" Kara said with a wince. "But, Dee--"

"No." Dee pushed her away, one of her hands colliding with Kara's burned fingers, and Kara recoiled with a pained shudder she couldn't suppress. "What--oh, frak me."

"Yeah," Kara muttered.

"Get over here," Dee said, slipping underneath Kara's arm again and tugging her upright from where she'd been listing sideways against the hull. "There's a first aid kit in the raptor."

"If Leoben didn't land in it when you shot him--" She knew her voice was taking on a kind of unhinged glee, but she had Dee pressed firmly into her side, Dee had just been _kissing her_ , and she'd survived another ridiculous mindfrak courtesy of another frakking Leoben. She was allowed to gloat a little. And gloat on Dee's account, too. "Holy hell, Dee. That shot was one for the books."

"Don't start with me, Kara," Dee snarled as she half-dragged her ass up the loading ramp.

"Don't start wha--"

"You don't get to do this!" Dee exclaimed, lowering Kara to the flight deck a little too quickly and grabbing the morpha ampoules that lay scattered across the ground but had remained--somehow, mercifully--intact.

"Do what?"

Dee frowned as she eased a dose of morpha into a needle. "Okay," she muttered, cradling Kara's right hand carefully in hers and slipping the needle straight through Kara's burned-on glove and into her twitching palm.

The second dose went into Kara's left hand just as smoothly, and she finally felt like she could breathe again. She inhaled hugely, just to be sure, and pushed where she knew she shouldn't. "Do _what?_ "

"Do this. This crap." Dee sealed both needle and ampoule inside the biodisposal bag in the first aid kit. "You left!"

"I left?"

"You left," she said emphatically, pacing over to Leoben's corpse and peering cautiously at the body before grabbing it by the feet and beginning to drag it toward the hydraulic door. "You left. Me. And you've been cheating with my husband! _And you have a husband!_ "

Oh. That. Having separate husbands and separate marriages felt really far away after the past three days, but-- "I'm the worst. But, Dee--"

"No. You don't get to make this all about you. Not everything is about you, Kara!"

"I know that!" she snapped, and regretted it immediately when Dee's face went blank and emotionless.

"I'm going to check the hull," Dee said coolly, and slipped back out the door.

Kara turned her gaze to the corpse left lying at the top of the ramp.

"That went well," she told Leoben's body, and flipped it over with her foot to tumble off the side of the raptor. The stupid, godscursed stone followed with a single kick and a dull thud.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So... Maelstrom kicked my ass. But since we all know perfect is the enemy of good, it was time to start posting the next few chapters anyway.
> 
> I've appropriated (read: wildly mangled) substantial chunks of canon dialogue in this chapter, and you can expect more in the next few. In case anyone's interested in the stolen dialogue (and because I can't stand not to attribute things properly), I'm going to start noting episode numbers on each chapter that recycles lines from the show.
> 
> Belated note that chapter 6 stole some dialogue from episode 3.12; this one has bits of 3.12 and 3.13.
> 
> I've also added series information to this fic! [And a prequel](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11610057), if you happen to be interested in the Dee/Kara backstory. *ducks and runs*

"The ship's structurally intact," Dee said curtly as she slid into the copilot's seat moments later.

"Okay." Kara said. "That means that the only thing keeping us grounded is the busted fly-by-wire, so. You've got to bypass those bundles with the data cord from the comm system, and then we may have a shot at getting out of here." She groaned, slamming her head against the back of the chair as another flare of pain shot through her right hand. Dee had done her best to wrap the palms, right over Kara's burned-on piloting gloves, but there was only so much she could do with a raptor's med kit. The morpha was wearing off already.

Dee administered a second dose with cool sympathy and her voice was all business as she packed away the ampoule and needle. "There's only one left. Better save it for when you fly us out of here."

For someone so smart--godsdamnit. "I can't fly. Especially all whacked up on morpha."

Dee all but snarled. "Well, that's just frakking great."

There was a beat of silence in which Kara could feel the weight of Dee's rage pressing on her, and her head spun from morpha, from smoke, from _kissing Dee_ , gods. All Kara wanted to do was reach out and force her way past Dee's anger, then hold onto her as if the past eight years had never happened. As though history could be rewritten, as if Kara could take back her terrible choices and seize control of her own fate.

But she didn't get to hold onto Dee or make it better. This was the mess she'd wrought for herself, instead of that other life on Pegasus that she couldn't possibly have earned, and Dee didn't deserve to be Kara's collateral damage.

"It's not what you think, Dee," she said softly.

Dee scoffed. "What do I think?"

"You think Lee and I--" She had to pause in her explanation to cough up more of the dry smoke that lingered in the raptor's cabin, and by the time she had her breathing under control again she'd forgotten what she'd been saying.

Everything was spinning, though, and she needed to make Dee understand. "I'm sorry. I really am. But I was there, we were there on the Pegasus, and _it_ _worked_. I don't know how, but it worked. You convinced me. You and Lee. You showed me."

She only realized how unhinged she sounded when Dee's palm hit her cheek. The noise of the slap shocked her upright more than the pain.

"Stay with it," Dee said bitterly. "You've still got to walk me through these avionics."

"I'm right here. I'm just trying to talk to you." Damn, everything was blurry.

"Yeah, I know what you're trying to do," Dee grunted, pulling data cables from under the raptor's dash. **"** Save it for someone who cares."

"You used to care."

She wasn't sure Dee had heard her, but repeating herself would have taken more effort than she could muster.

What did it matter, anyway? Dee didn't care what she had to say.

A minute later, Dee said softly, still staring into the guts of the raptor's burned out control panel, "That was a long time ago."

 

* * *

 

They made it home.

Dee got them home, white-knuckling it all the way, terrified and heroic.

Kara could have kissed her again once they'd cleared atmo, but.

Well.

She knew better than that, didn't she?

Sam and Lee met them at their raptor for the actual most awkward reunion in history. Kara hated them both; hated Sam even as she clung to him, hated watching Dee and Lee make wounded faces at each other across the flight deck before they gave in to momentum and held each other tight.

She hated everything, because everything was horrible and it all frakking hurt, and it was her fault.

She had kissed Dee, and before that she had tried (and failed, which made it even worse) to cheat on Sam with Lee. And, of course, she had fought with Lee about the abomination that was divorce, as if she could ever leave Sam.

But, hey, the four of them had survived a supernova and another standoff with the Cylons. Score one in the plus column.

 

* * *

 

It turned out Lee and Sam had almost come to blows down on the algae planet, or almost shot each other, depending which eyewitness you believed. She was inclined to credit the version in which Lee pulled a gun on Sam, but only because she knew better than anyone that Lee could be an idiot when he felt like he'd been backed into a corner--and he'd sent _Dee_ to rescue her, after all. She couldn't think of a more idiotic plan than that, and she'd had days to pretend she wasn't trying.

She didn't regret being rescued from Leoben and his mystical stone. But she couldn't forgive Lee for sending Dee in after her, either.

She wondered how he lived with himself.

She wondered how Dee could stand to share his bed after he'd all but sacrificed her life for Kara's.

 

* * *

 

She wished she could forget what she'd seen. If she could only scrub those three days out of her brain, if she could forget that fairy tale dream she'd had about Pegasus, then she could go back to flirting dangerously with Lee, to _wham-bam-thank-you_ -Sam, to contriving every plausible way to avoid running into Dee. She was good at it, by now--juggling all the broken pieces and never letting anything land on her for long enough to leave a mark.

Before the algae planet, everything had been fine and--

Frak it. Nothing had been _fine_ in a very long time, and Leoben's frakking visions only shone light through the cracks and made the problems harder to ignore.

 _Godsdamn_ Leoben. Bad enough to know the damage was there; she didn't want to _see_ the broken parts when there was nothing she could to do fix any of it.

She couldn't sleep, and when she did, she wished she hadn't. One night, she dreamed about Leoben and the stone, and woke from it certain that he was watching her, somehow, despite her blackout curtain and the quiet duty locker. Despite every Leoben she'd ever met being either dead or far, far away.

The second time she startled awake that night, she gave up on sleep and went to sweat out her issues with a punching bag rather than lie there imagining Leoben's breath on the back of her neck.

It was 0330 and the gym was empty, and his words rang in her ears every time she hit the bag.

_Where you went wrong was in deviating from the will of the gods._

Her hands were only halfway healed from the burns and they ached with each blow, so she punched harder. The bag sailed too far, came back at her too hard. She hit it again.

The gods didn't tell her what to do. She didn't have a destiny. She was a human being and she was in frakking control of her own frakked up life.

_Through this stone, Momus can open your eyes and show you the error of your ways._

It had opened her eyes, all right. She'd seen Dee and Sam and Lee, and they were happy. Not because she was dead and gone and out of their lives, the way you'd think it might have worked, but because she'd _married_ them. She'd proposed to them and then she'd married them all.

It boggled the mind.

They were _all_ _happy_ , in a universe where she got to be happy, too.

But it hadn't been real.

 

* * *

 

When she finally nodded off the next night, she was lost in a gas nebula, chasing a bogey that appeared and disappeared on DRADIS. She dodged and wove through swirling vapours, yellow-red-blue, while a voice crackled in and out on the wireless that sounded--when she could hear it at all--suspiciously like Kat.

Kat sounded scared, and she kept telling Kara to pull up, begging her to break off and climb, swearing at her and calling her every terrible name they had ever thrown at one another, and Kara refused to listen until she hit the hard deck and woke up.

 

* * *

 

A few nights after that, she dreamed herself into Pegasus Commander's quarters, making love to Dee. Kara pulled her fingers from Dee's dripping cunt and licked them deliberately, laughing as Dee frowned up at her. She laughed again, breathless, when Dee flipped their positions on the huge bed and--

\--they weren't on Pegasus any more. Kara landed on her back on a sagging twin bed, Dee crouched over her and silhouetted against the sunshine pouring through Graystone's paned windows--the windows of Dee's old residence room back at CMA.

Graystone Hall. It had been... a long few years. It felt like a lifetime ago.

Dee gazed down in all her nakedness at Kara and smiled, looking about 22 again (and, gods, had they really been that young?). Kara reached up to cup Dee's breasts, ran one thumb over a nipple. Dee gasped, opened her mouth to speak, and Kara almost jumped out of her skin when Dee said, _in Helo's voice_ , "This was on the temple. Where'd you get the idea to paint yours?"

And suddenly Kara was tumbling through a vortex of smoke and primary colours, the colours of the pattern she'd painted since childhood, and she had the answer to _everything_ on the tip of her tongue, she knew she did--she could almost taste it--

Kara shook awake and lay gasping for breath in her rack, desperate for something to hold onto, and not knowing where in the world to run.

 

* * *

 

She called Sam, said almost nothing, and within hours he was on a raptor back from the Argo Navis, where he'd been taking odd jobs with some of his guerilla buddies. She finished her viper rotation and stormed into her duty locker to find him already lying in her rack, boots and all.

Their clothes lasted all of half a minute. Two very satisfying rounds in her rack took them another forty.

Then they sat, drinking together in the dark, until her nerves started to jangle and she remembered why seeing Sam was a straight up terrible idea.

"You're being awfully accommodating," she snapped before she could help herself.

He sighed. "Is that how it looks to you?"

"Your estranged, two-timing bitch of a wife calls for a quickie and you hop on the first shuttle? I'd say yeah."

Far too calmly, he said, "I've been thinking about some stuff, Kara."

She sneered. "Yeah, like what?"

"Like what that crazy skinjob Leoben said about you. A special destiny. What if there's something to that?"

If she hadn't been struggling with that frakking word all week, it might not have hit her like a punch to the gut. "Kara Thrace and her special destiny? That sounds more like a bad cover band, Sam."

"Think about it, though," he pressed. "Why did--"

"I have been," she cut him off. "I've been doing nothing but thinking, ever since that godsdamn algae planet."

Sam grimaced. "So what've you been thinking?"

"I don't know," she admitted. "Leoben wants me to have a special destiny? Fine, maybe I do. But maybe it's not what he thinks. He told me he was going to show me _the error of my ways_ , and what I saw was you, and me, and Dee, and Lee, on the Pegasus. And we were _happy_."

"Happy?"

"Crazy, right?"

"A bit," he said skeptically. "The four of us living on the same ship, the ship Lee commanded, and nobody killed each other?"

"Not just the same ship." At his questioning stare, she shrugged and took another swig. "We were living in Commander's quarters. You and me. With the two of them."

"...With them."

"We married them, Sam. We'd married them on New Caprica. We had an _old-fashioned frakking group marriage_ , the four of us. Rings and all--no tattoos. And it worked. I don't know how, none of it makes any godsdamn sense to me, but it worked and we were," her voice cracked, "we weren't so broken. And we were all..." Still bewildered, she said it again, "... _happy_."

Sam was silent for so long that she finally glanced over to gauge his reaction. He looked startled, but not disgusted. "You said _Leoben_ showed you this?"

"On the algae planet. Before Dee blew his brains out and flew us off that rock."

"This is frakking insane," Sam muttered, rubbing reflexively at his half of their pair tatt.

She bristled. "You think I don't know that?"

"I don't--of course I--" He sighed heavily. "Do you love them?"

"What?"

"Lee, Kara. And Dee. Do you love them?"

"Gods, Sam." Of course he went straight for the jugular. There was a reason she'd married him, and it wasn't just for his pretty face. "...Maybe. I dunno."

"Then you've got to talk to them."

"Sam," she said brokenly.

 _I can't_ , she meant. And, _I don't deserve you._

_I don't deserve a second chance. And they're too smart to give me one, even if you aren't._


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Coupla lines from 3.12 in this chapter.

She wasn't going to do it.

She couldn't talk to Lee or to Dee, no matter what Sam said. But.

Damn it. Everything she'd seen in those three days on Pegasus that had never happened, the conversations she'd had with her _spouses_ there, even the Doc's jabs about the four of them needing therapy--it all sat under her skin like gravel in a wound, rubbing her raw.

She didn't know how to put it aside.

She didn't, truth be told, know that she wanted to.

 

* * *

 

In exchange for his drop to the algae planet--which he hadn't wanted anyway--Kara had agreed to take Hot Dog's doughnut runs for the next month, and now that her hands were recovered the bastard was determined to collect on the deal.

Which is how Kara wound up on a courier run to Colonial One the same day all hell broke loose with Galactica's air filtration system. Secondhand chaos rippled through the fleet, and Kara sat cooling her heels on Colonial One for over an hour while the President's staff scurried about like workers in a kicked anthill, refusing to meet Kara's eyes or mutter more than two words in her direction. Finally, a staffer so junior she couldn't have been of majority when the Cylons attacked came to a stuttering halt in front of Kara's chair.

"Miss Starbuck, sir?"

"Just Starbuck."

The staffer twitched, one heel tapping nervously against the carpet. "The President can see you now. This way."

She followed the very young and very awkward aide--Roslin sure had a type--into the inner sanctum. The President didn't rise from behind her desk, but she did wave Kara toward a seat.

"Captain Thrace. Come in."

Kara pulled out the damn mail packet that had got her stuck there in the first place and shrugged instead of sitting. "Courier from Galactica, Madam President."

"Thank you. I'd apologize for the wait," the President said with a smile, taking the envelope, "but, as I'm sure you're aware, today's mess was out of my hands. I hope you're doing well?"

"I... yes, Madam President. Thank you for asking."

"And your husband?"

 _Which one?_ An irreverent corner of Kara's brain snickered as she slouched into the seat in front of the President's desk. "Sam's fine, I guess. He's been picking up odd jobs on Argo Navis and a couple of other ships. We're not..."

Roslin looked up from the mail package when Kara didn't continue. "Not?"

"Not together. Right now."

"I see." The President nodded neutrally. "Well, wish him my best when you next see him."

"I will, Madam President."

Roslin looked up from the contents of Galactica's courier packet with a slightly abstracted frown. "Was there something else, Captain?"

Kara shouldn't ask, but... "You've had visions, Madame President."

Roslin looked her straight in the eyes for a moment before she nodded. "Yes, I have."

"How..." Kara paused, reconsidered her words, and swallowed what she'd been about to say. Then started again with the same godsdamn words as before. "How do you know they were real? That you weren't just going crazy?"

The look on the President's face could only be described as Laura Roslin's patented _your bullshit does not impress me_ stare. "The true answer?"

Kara nodded.

"I didn't," Roslin said. "I don't."

"Then how did you know you could trust them?"

The President thought for a moment, straightening the papers in front of her into a neat pile. "Sometimes it's simply a matter of faith," she said at last. "Faith in the gods, maybe. But mostly faith in yourself."

Kara forced a shit-eating grin to her face. "I'm the last person you should be telling to have faith in herself."

"Hmm," the President mused. "Then maybe you need it even more than most."

 

* * *

 

A Kara Thrace who had faith in herself, who believed she could salvage anything from the mess that was her life, would have talked to Dee.

Kara was absolutely, definitely, not going to talk to Dee.

Lee tried to corner Kara after a briefing one morning, with a particular look in his eye that meant something irritating and heavy-handed was about to come out of his mouth. Kara dodged into the press of pilots headed for the door, forced a laugh at Narcho's pathetic boasting, and made her escape before Lee could cause a scene.

She wasn't going to talk to anyone about anything ever-- _frak_ Sam and frak the President and frak all the gods and especially, _especially_ , frak Leoben and his destinies.

 

* * *

 

"Lastly," Lee concluded his briefing two days later, "we're shorthanded on repair crews. Anyone with skills in engineering or avionics, and who has a free watch or two in the next week, is being asked to _volunteer_ ," his tone and raised brows said it all, "by reporting to me or to Colonel Tigh in the next few hours for assignment to one of the temporary repair crews."

"What if we don't have mechanical training?" Racetrack called from the back of the room.

"Anyone who doesn't have the technical background to be useful on a repair crew, but is still prepared to volunteer, will be found something else to do," Lee intoned. "Between you and me, though, Racetrack, there's a cushy job rewiring raptors that has your name all over it."

"Ugh," Racetrack groaned, and a few people laughed. Kara kept her head down and didn't meet Lee's eyes, didn't join the crowd jostling to volunteer, and made her way out the door unchallenged again.

She hit the CIC with a grin six minutes later and tossed a crooked salute at Tigh. "Heard you were collecting volunteers."

Tigh chuckled. "Heard you were making a nuisance of yourself on the flight deck again."

"Gotta have a hobby," she told him in the same tone. "Where do you want me?"

"Lee's handling all the avionics assignments," Tigh grunted, reading off a flimsy, "so if you want one of those--"

Kara shrugged.

Tigh's eyebrows shot up to his nonexistent hairline. "Right. You can help Dualla run wiring checks on the comm system."

"But--"

His expression told her she was treading on dangerous ground.

"Fine," she ground out.

"The comm inspection's scheduled for day after tomorrow. Figure out when you're both free before then." _Not my problem_ was silently but forcefully implied.

Damn it.

 "We're on comms repair together," Kara muttered as she swept past Dee. "I have third and fifth watch free tomorrow."

"Why the frak would you volunteer for--"

"Wasn't my decision."

"Like that's ever stopped you before," Dee snapped. "Third watch, then. Meet me here."

Kara grimaced, nodded, and--not knowing what else to say--left.

 

* * *

 

Dee was right, of course. Kara didn't have to take Tigh's assignment. She could have argued with him; she could've gone back to Lee and volunteered to help with viper repairs instead. Surely a thirty-second conversation with Lee about volunteer crews would've been easier to stomach than spending hours in the guts of the CIC's comm console with Dee.

Well, the work needed to be done.

And maybe a part of Kara, some self-destructive part that didn't know when to quit, had jumped at the chance to work with Dee, because. Well.

She didn't _miss_ Dee, okay? How the frak did you miss someone based on three days of a marriage that had never really happened?

But it wasn't just those three days. It was the years spent telling herself she _didn't_ miss Dee, that she hadn't screwed up, that the thing they'd had in college was nothing, that Dee was better off without her.

She didn't want to retool a frakking console in the CIC with Dee, but if she had to, well...

No. No, she was absolutely not going to talk to Dee about anything. At all.

It was easy at first. Dee had opened up the comm panel before Kara arrived, so all they had to do was haul out the cable bundles, pull them apart, and run a multimeter sweep and visual check of the entire assembly. Not scintillating work by a long shot, but at least they didn't have to talk as they did it.

Dee seemed to be of the same mind, moving efficiently through bales of cables with barely a glance at Kara.

Furiously angry suited Dee.

The thought caught Kara off guard, even though it shouldn't have, and only because Dee was stupidly hot when she was pissed and Kara wanted--

"You're staring again," Dee muttered as she stripped insulation off the end of a data cord and added it to the steadily growing pile of scraps for binning.

"Again?" Kara asked, before realizing that was akin to an admission of guilt. "...Am not."

Dee rolled her eyes, dropped her wire shears, and twisted the newly trimmed cable back into place. "Gods, Kara, I thought you knew these electronics. Watch what you're doing there."

Kara glanced down, realized she'd been connecting a fibre optic relay in the wrong order, and lowered what she'd been holding to glare at Dee. "I think we messed up."

"No kidding," Dee muttered.

"I don't mean the comms panel."

"I don't really give a frak," Dee said. "Either do the job or get out of the way so I can."

"Dee--"

"Don't."

Kara hadn't realized she was reaching for her. "I wasn't--"

Dee shot her a _look,_ and Kara abruptly recalled the frantic kiss they'd shared on the algae planet--Dee's hands on her hips, the hull cool against her back, Dee's body pinning hers to the raptor, the scents of algae and sweat and lingering smoke from that infernal stone of Leoben's.

"I shouldn't have kissed you," Kara admitted. "I was way out of line, I was confused and--"

"Confused? You're going with _confused?_ Who did you think you were kissing?"

"You! You're not going to believe me--" She forced her voice down to a hoarse whisper. "Frak, I wouldn't believe me, but I'd just spent three days on Pegasus thanks to Leoben and a godsdamn chunk of rock that he called the Momus Stone."

"Momus," Dee repeated skeptically, her hands stilling on the cable bundle she'd been reassembling. Of course Dee, with her Sagittaron upbringing, would know about Momus.

"I saw things," Kara said doggedly. "Leoben said the stone would show me _the error of my ways_ , whatever the frak that means, but I saw us together, you and me and Sam and Lee, in some alternate version of reality where Pegasus wasn't destroyed and --gods, Dee. We were all married and it _worked_ somehow and you were, we were--"

"Sounds like a nice dream," Dee interrupted sharply, and Kara couldn't take it.

"It wasn't a dream," she said viciously, "and I fought it. I told them it was ridiculous, I said it had to be a bad joke. Until you convinced me."

"You've never let me convince you of anything."

"Maybe you never tried hard enough before!"

Kara looked up to realize that most of the CIC had fallen silent and everyone was conspicuously _not looking_ at the corner in front of the comms console where she and Dee were crouched on the deck, surrounded by fibre optics and wires, and shouting at each another.

Or maybe Kara was the only one doing any shouting.

"Godsdamn it, Dee," she muttered at significantly lower volume, "I'm not crazy. This happened. I was there."

Dee muttered, "If you're going to tell me it was real--"

"It wasn't _real_. But it still happened to me."

Dee shook her head. "You're saying Leoben showed you some vision of all of us happily married?"

"I know it sounds crazy--"

"It does sound crazy," Dee agreed, "and I don't believe any of it."

"Frak's sake. Why would I make this up?"

"Why do you do anything? Why are you frakking around with my husband?"

"We're not frakking ar--" But no. Dee deserved not only honesty, but truth. "Lee won't cheat. He's too honourable."

"Unlike you?"

"Yeah, unlike me."

"And you wonder why I don't believe you about _visions_ ," Dee spat.

"I don't wonder at all," Kara muttered. "But I'm still telling you the gods' honest truth."

"Fine. Then what Leoben showed you has to be fake. He's messing with your head again."

"Obviously!"

"If it's so obvious," Dee snapped, "then why are we talking about it?"

"I don't know!" But of course she did. _Because I'm going out of my mind. Because Sam thinks I should talk to you. Because the President frakking told me to trust myself, but I don't know how._

Dee sighed so bleakly that Kara could have sworn she saw Gaeta, hovering at the far end of his station, flinch in her peripheral vision. "Gods, Kara, what do you even want from me?"

"...I don't know."

"That's cruel, and you know it."

"You're right. I didn't think--"

"Of course you didn't think." Dee finally met her eyes across the two feet of deck between them. "When have you ever thought things through?"

Stung, Kara snapped, "That's not fair."

"How is it not fair?"

"I warned you a long time ago that I was bad news, and you're the one who wouldn't think things through then!"

"Frak you."

"For being right?" Kara demanded, as Dee got to her feet and continued to glare down at her.

"No," Dee said. "For always deciding to do this."


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More dialogue lifted liberally from 3.13 and 3.17. (Yes, that 3.17.)

It didn't quite ruin Kara's night when she looked across the room and saw Dee and Lee holding hands under a table and making eyes at each other, but it did knock her off balance for a few seconds--a sour sucker punch to the gut. All she'd wanted was a night out with her husband, a few drinks, maybe a bar fight. Something to take her mind off of... everything else.

But of course Dee and Lee had kissed and made up. Of course neither of them wanted anything to do with her, now.

"You all right?" Sam asked, following her eyes and then resolutely turning back to her at the bar, always back to her--whether or not she wanted or deserved his loyalty. "Listen, we don't have to stay here if you don't want to."

She tore her eyes from Dee, who'd turned to meet Kara's gaze. Impossible to know what Dee was thinking--it always had been--but that didn't matter any more. They had all made their own beds.

Lee turned to gaze across the room at Kara, too, following Dee's eyes, and with--were those tear tracks on his cheeks?

Frak them.

She nodded at Sam and forced a smile. "Yeah."

She could tell from the look on Sam's face that she hadn't come close to convincing him, so she leaned in and kissed him softly.

He tasted like bottom-shelf booze and like himself, and she--well. Sam was hers, and she was here with him, and that was what counted in the real world.

He leveled her with another considering glance that said, loud and clear, _I'm going to take your bullshit at face value but we both know I can see right through you_. Then he nodded to Joe, behind the bar. "Two whiskies, straight up."

 

* * *

 

Kara heard after the fact that Dee had nearly died in Dogsville. That rat bastard bigot of a doctor had almost killed her, for no reason but a coincidence of birth and his own misdirected rage.

It would have been a meaningless death, of the kind that scared Kara senseless, and she refused to think about Dee dying that way. Or any way.

There were more than enough echoing, hollow places in her heart already.

 

* * *

 

She dreamed she was back in her own apartment in Delphi, staring up at her mural on the wall.

She thought the nukes must have already fallen; there was dead silence on the street outside, in a way there never had been in the city--not in the dead of night, and certainly never in this kind of broad daylight.

She stared up at the mandala that had once been such a comfort, and felt nothing but fear.

If there was a destiny in this particular pattern, in the scrawl of her words, she wished she could unknow it.

 _I'm not ready to die,_ she thought--

\--and there was a can of white paint in her hand and a flat brush in the other, and she was slapping paint over the mural like her life depended on it. The brush was too slow, so she tipped the can against the wall and used her hands to spread the paint around, messy and acrid. She needed the godsdamn mandala _gone_ , needed to erase it. If she could purge its colours from her wall and from her mind then maybe, maybe--

The only sound in the world was the slap of the latex paint against her hands, the clang of the dropped can against her old coffee table, the rasp of her own breath. And then, so quiet she could almost have missed it, she heard a soft tread behind her.

Dee's arms slipped around her, silent and sure, and Kara leaned back into her embrace.

Kara turned in Dee's arms only to be shoved against the wall and kissed into the wet paint. In seconds, they both were filthy with it, rocking against each another until they toppled to the ground, dripping with paint and desperate for contact.

Kara kept her fingers curled protectively away, not wanting to smear Dee with paint, but Dee's hands were clean and she had no such compunctions. She pinned Kara to the floor beneath her and tugged at the clean parts of their clothing until she was teasing between Kara's legs, stroking her clit in the same rhythm as her kiss.

Desperate for more friction, Kara lifted her hips and pushed up into Dee's hand. Dee chuckled, low and intent, and continued tormenting her with soft, careful strokes that never quite delivered on their promise. Panting up into Dee's mouth, trying to silently coerce her into putting more pressure on her clit, Kara caught a sudden hint of movement behind Dee and looked up in panic--but there was nothing there.

The mural was gone. She had _literally_ whitewashed her destiny. It was over and done.

She let her eyes fall closed as Dee kissed tracks down her throat, only to blink them open again as Dee eased two fingers inside her. Kara groaned, staring up at the wet paint as Dee stroked her inner walls, savouring the soft hot burn and knowing she was too close to climax to hold off for long.

As her orgasm tore through her, she looked up at the blank white wall--and watched the the mandala's blue-red-yellow burn vividly through the white--

She blinked awake in her rack.

 

* * *

 

She was scheduled to fly CAP in an hour so she skipped the punching bag and went straight to the head, where she splashed her face with the coldest water she could pry from the faucet and wished she could turn off her godsdamn brain. Failing that, she wished she thought a shower would make her feel better.

(Smell better? Definitely. Feel better? Eh.)

Helo wandered in while she was still trying to drown herself in the sink and bent to his own morning rituals.

"You're up early," he greeted her when she came up for air.

"You, too."

"Yeah," he agreed, lathering up old-fashioned shaving soap. "Hera gets these nightmares. Wakes up crying and shaking. By the time we calm her down and get her back to sleep, I'm wide awake. All that crap she went through on New Caprica really left its mark on her."

Kara crossed the room, dried her face, and refused to look at him as she said, "Yeah, I know just how she feels." When he didn't react, she admitted, "Wish you never would've shown me that picture of that frakking mandala. I dream about it and that bastard Leoben every godsdamn night. That or..."

She paused, towel in one hand, staring down at the other wrist. It had been covered in white paint, and Dee had--

"That weirdass vision you had on the algae planet?" Helo asked, interrupting her thoughts.

"Yeah. Dee and Lee and Sam, or the mandala," she admitted, still reluctant to meet his eyes. She wouldn't be telling him this at all--wouldn't have told him about the other Pegasus in the first place--if they didn't keep running into each other at ass o'clock in the morning, when her verbal filter was just as dead on its feet as the rest of her. "Or all of it, mashed together. I feel like I'm losing my mind here."

Helo looked up, lower half of his face covered in lather, deep creases visible at the corners of his eyes. (Kara wondered when they had both started to get so damn old. Crow's feet, for frak's sake.) "You know, Kara," Helo said carefully, "there's a, um, psychiatrist aboard _Inchon Velle.._."

 

* * *

 

Helo had to have known she wasn't going to talk to some godsdamn shrink. Shrinks were for people who were crazy.

Kara wasn't crazy.

But maybe... maybe she could visit the oracle he'd mentioned next.

 

* * *

 

She had fond memories of an oracle her mother had consulted when Kara was small. The old woman had been in her eighties at least, tiny and frail like a sick bird. There'd been a big bowl of lemon candies in her waiting room, and the scent of artificial lemon still took Kara back to those hazy memories of comfort and mysticism; incense, listening through walls, and her mother's rare good moods afterward.

"You're special," Socrata had said more than once after consulting the oracle. She'd even held Kara's hand as they walked to the bus stop, headed toward home. "You and me, we're warriors. You're meant for more than this."

 _More than this. Special. You have to be strong._ Utter crap. Bullshit daydreams.

And yet.

Maybe she'd go speak to Dogsville's oracle.

 

* * *

Kara felt small again, stepping into the oracle's tent. She felt even smaller once she sat across from her, pinned like a fly in amber by the oracle's blind stare. The sound of dripping water was caught and muffled in the patchwork tent walls; it seemed to come from all around.

"I, uh," Kara muttered, feeling like an imposter the second she opened her mouth. "I can't sleep. I have these nightmares."

"About your lover?" the oracle asked coolly, her voice unexpectedly deep, carelessly musical. She was young for an oracle and, Kara couldn't help noticing, very pretty. "The one you left behind, the one you thought you'd destroy."

"No," Kara jerked upright. "That's not what I--"

"Dee," the oracle said with a smile in her voice, as if Dee's name tasted good on her tongue.

Kara found herself admitting, reluctantly, "I couldn't be what she needed."

"She knows you better than you know yourself, Kara Thrace. She sees the truth about you. About your destiny."

"You don't--" Kara tried to rise, to walk away, but was jerked back to her knees by the oracle's impossibly strong grip on her wrist. She glared. "The only destiny I have is as a world-class frak-up."

 _"_ Who hurts everyone she cares about. That was your mother's gift to you, wasn't it? _So many lies,"_ the oracle said, and Kara could hear the echo of Leoben's words in her voice, could see him in the way she tilted her head. " _You'll be able to quit lying to yourself soon. Momus will open your eyes."_

The frak he would. "Somebody told you what Leoben said to me?"

The oracle's unseeing eyes seemed to bore into her. "Did you ever tell anyone about the things he's taught you? The lies you've needed to forget? You learned the wrong lesson from your mother, Kara, and you learned worse from Zak."

 _Don't you dare touch Zak_ , Kara wanted to say, but the oracle's voice rolled on like the tide.

 _"You were born to a woman_ ," and Leoben's inflections were plain again, " _who believed suffering was good for the soul, so you suffered. Your life is a testament to pain. You want to believe it, because it means that you're bad luck._ That you killed Zak. That you hurt Dee."

"I did."

"You confused the messenger with the message. Your mother was trying to teach you something else."

"You don't know crap about my mother."

"Dee does," the oracle replied. "She sees the patterns. Sees how it all fits together. She's coming for you soon. Dee will show you the error of your ways."


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 3.17
> 
> Readers who are very familiar with BSG canon will see that I didn't really _write_ this chapter; I just sort of picked up half an episode and shook it to see what fell out. I promise there's a whack of genuinely original content coming up next--but, you know, there's no escaping destiny. Especially if your name is Kara Thrace...

There _had_ been a raider in the storm system.

She'd gone after it; it had turned and collided with her viper--she'd felt the impact as the bogey bounced off her hull. She'd seen the damn thing with her own two eyes, no matter what anyone's DRADIS said.

...But had it been there?

Her gun camera film showed nothing. The clouds were undisturbed save for her weapons, firing on empty sky.

But she had _seen_ it.

She had.

She'd also seen colours in the heart of the storm system that couldn't exist; seen Sam standing outside her viper, dressed in his old C-Bucs jersey, backlit in a white room--

Gods, she really was losing it, wasn't she?

Kara hadn't meant to go off at the Chief. Frak it. She knew what hydraulic fluid looked like, but everything was spinning around her and for just a second, when she looked at the dark oil, she'd smelled the iron tang of blood in the back of her throat and she'd just--

She wasn't proud of herself. She didn't want to be in this deep, defending her senses when they were clearly wrong, when no one else could see what she had seen.

But, frak it all to hell, the raider had been there. It _was_ there.

 

* * *

 

"So what'd the old man have to say about my combat report?" she asked Lee. "Starbuck's finally gone off the deep end? Unfit for duty?"

Lee, being Lee, met her eyes across the span of Memorial Hall and shouldered the whole frakking mess himself. "He said I'm the CAG. It's my call."

"Ah," she hedged. "And what do you say?"

"Well, I say I trust your eyes over DRADIS any day of the week. Something could have been there and vanished in the cloud cover."

Could have. Maybe. "So you don't think I'm nuts?"

Lee didn't miss a beat. "I didn't say that. You're a raving lunatic, as demented and deranged as the first day I met you."

"And you're a bastard." She'd meant to laugh, but everything hurt so damn much that she didn't quite have it in her.

"Look," Lee said, smiling at the ground--but she lost the rest of his words to the glowing corneas of the remembrance candles, drops of melted wax hitting the deck plates in layered patterns that sprawled across the floor and gleamed red-yellow-blue, drop-drip-drop of wax--and she couldn't escape it, the godsdamn mandala was everywhere.

The pooling wax reminded Kara of her dream, of primary colours rising through fresh white paint as Dee pressed two fingers into her. Dee's thumb stroking Kara's clit, Dee's body poised over hers, the scent of fresh paint and burning candles--

Godsdamn it. She really needed to shake this.

She pulled her eyes from the concentric circles of wax on the floor and glanced at Lee--

\--and an image bubbled up: Lee shoving her into fresh-spilled paint and taking her, _Lee_ teasing her with his fingers, his hard body resting over hers, staring down at her with his heart in his eyes--

She dragged her thoughts back to reality.

Frak all of it.

Lee was still saying something, and she just about caught,  "--your share. Get some rest. Or you will start seeing things."

 _Gods_ , Lee.

She grunted something that must have appeased him, because he patted her awkwardly on the shoulder and left. She sat for a few more minutes staring into the glowing candle wicks before she rose and made her way toward the fore of the ship, not really thinking about where she was headed, letting her feet take her anywhere at all.

She'd wanted Lee to tell her she wasn't crazy. Still, she wondered if it might be better for everyone if he'd just admit what they all knew was happening and frakking ground her before it was too late.

Before she was crushed by the weight of her own destiny.

 

* * *

 

"Good hunting," the Admiral had said after she'd given him the Aurora as a figurehead for his ship.

Good hunting. Was she hunting?

 _What_ was she hunting?

 

* * *

 

Of course it would be Lee who came for her when she fell apart on the flight deck during routine inspec of her viper the next day.

"Feeling sorry for me?"

Lee took a seat beside her at a calculated distance--close but not too close, mustn't start any rumours flying--and looked at her like he saw right through the bluster. "Kara, everyone gets rattled. Even the best."

Not frakking good enough.

"I'm not going back out there," she told him. Lee knew as well as she did that it was a lie.

( _So many lies_.)

Of course she was going back outside. She belonged in her viper, and godsdamned destiny was calling. But destiny was why--

"I don't trust myself."

"Hmm," Lee mused, deliberate as frak. "So trust me. I'll fly your wing."

She remembered another Lee, in another life, telling her he believed in her.

"The CAG flying my number two?" she mocked him--mocked both versions of him--for daring to have faith in her when she didn't deserve it.

"Whatever it takes." He was staring now, looking at her like he really did trust her--more fool he--and she couldn't tear her gaze away.

 _Whatever happens, I believe in you,_ the other Lee had said. _You can do this._

She needed to tell Lee about the other Pegasus, about the life she'd seen in her illusory time there, but she couldn't find the words. And what if he benched her?

She pulled away. "How are things with you and Dee?"

"Uh, you know, good," he said carefully. Then, like a wall crumbling before her eyes, he grinned and admitted, "No, better than good. Best they've ever been."

Gods.

"I'm happy for you," she managed. "Really."

Somehow, even if it choked her, she really was happy to hear it. Even if she never got to be there with them, at least Lee and Dee could be happy.

"It's funny, though," she told him. _Lies, so many lies._ "After all we've been through, we're right back where we started. You're CAG, and I'm your hotshot problem pilot."

Lee laughed.

She grinned. "I guess that's all we'll ever be now, hmm?"

 

* * *

 

Her next run started smoothly. Clear skies, no Cylons, nothing to see here. Lee flew her wing as promised, smiling at her through their viper canopies, wreathed in clouds and sunlight and that unnerving Adama optimism. (Zak had had that kind of optimism. Before she got him killed.)

Another half hour to go. Everything was fine. They were nearly home free. Pass go, collect 200 cubits. Maybe she'd even catch some uninterrupted sleep tonight, and wouldn't that be a nice change.

She hadn't quite let her guard down, but she was damn well thinking about it when her imaginary raider popped out of the clouds on the far side of Lee's viper.

She shouted an explanation--"One turkey, my right-three level at ten, ducking in and out of the clouds. Engaging!"--and took off in pursuit, with Lee close behind her.

"Starbuck, Apollo," he said in her ear. "No joy."

Dee chimed in from the CIC, "Starbuck, Galactica. No DRADIS contact on your Cylon."

No frakking kidding, Dee. Tell me something I _don't_ know.

"Galactica, Starbuck," Kara told them both. She had eyes on the damn bogey, no matter what instruments said. "Weapons hot. Committing. This time I'm gonna drag him back and dump his sorry ass on the hangar deck."

She dove after the raider, which ducked between plumes of cloud and turned straight toward the heart of the storm system she and Lee had been avoiding all afternoon. Within seconds her DRADIS range was down to almost zilch, but--screw instruments--she still had eyes on the Cylon bastard.

Lee was shouting, but she could barely make out his words through static. "Starbuck, Apollo. I repeat-- got no sign of you or the raider."

It didn't matter. No way was she losing the ghost bogey this time.

"Starbuck! Report!"

The raider dodged, swerved into a wisp of cloud that billow out toward them--and vanished.

"Starbuck, report!"

Damn it.

Where in the hells could--

Something slammed into her viper, throwing Kara back in her seat and cracking her head against the canopy. There it was, gods damn it all to Cylon hell. But she'd lost control in the collision, and the blaring of the integrity alarm sounded too far away to be real. Frak, her head was spinning. She knew she had to pull up, had to regain control of her bird before she hit the planetary hard deck, but she couldn't remember--

"This is Apollo," she heard, as distant as the alarm. "Do you read me? Starbuck, report!"

She needed to open her eyes. She needed to--

 

* * *

 

She woke to an alarm blaring from her bedside table--her old analog clock alarm, in her old apartment back on Caprica.

Muscle memory hadn't survived the past couple years, apparently, because she twisted the dial the wrong way and the beeping turned into talk radio. "Good morning, Delphi, got another hot one in store for you today! Time to head for the beach. Weatherman says we can exp--"

Someone reached past Kara's head and switched off the radio.

Kara startled, turning to face the intruder, but she already knew who it had to be.

"Rise and shine," Dee said, settling next to Kara on her futon with barely a dip in the mattress. She stroked her way down Kara's bare back, ran her fingers through her hair. "We have a big day ahead of us."

This couldn't be real. Kara was in a viper, chasing shadows through a gas giant.

Not here. Not back in long-dead Delphi, with Dee of all people.

"Come on," Dee said, like a gust of air on a stifling summer's day.

Kara rose to her feet and followed her.

She dressed in a stupor and let Dee lead her to the couch. Then she sat on the edge of the coffee table, under the stupid symbol she had painted on her wall a lifetime ago.

The one she drew in her dreams every godsdamn night.

"I'm not here," she told Dee softly, savagely. "I'm out cold, or still stuck in Leoben's vision. This is all frakking mind games, like the godsdamn Pegasus."

Dee shook her head before Kara had finished speaking. "No games, Kara," she said. "This is about your destiny."

Without breaking eye contact, Kara grabbed the vase of paintbrushes next to her hip and threw it at the mural. Shards of pottery went everywhere. "I write my own destiny."

"I didn't paint that symbol, Kara. You did," Dee said, unflinching. Softly, she added, "You saw it again."

Kara was on her feet, moving away, as Dee continued.

"...In the clouds, didn't you? You didn't tell anyone. Because you're drawn to it. You feel its pull. You want to fly into it. You want to cross over, but you're afraid. The same way you're afraid of me."

"I'm not afraid of you."

Dee's eyebrows shot up as loudly as if she'd outright called Kara a liar. She handwaved at the wall. "But you are afraid of this."

Kara snorted. "Of what, a frakking cloud?"

"Of the unknown," Dee said, sounding nothing like Dee but an awful lot like Dogsville's Oracle. She rose from her seat and settled next to Kara again, whispering in her ear. "Death. Love. Who you could be. All of your high wire stunts have been an act. You've been afraid ever since that day."

Kara pulled back. "What day?"

 

* * *

Oh, no.

They weren't in Kara's derelict Delphi apartment any more. This was Caprica City--the shitty part of New Gemenon no less--and they were standing next to Kara's mother's desk, staring down at a letter from the Caprican Veteran's Hospital and choking on secondhand smoke.

Oh, gods, no.

Anything but this.

Dee said, inscrutably, "All of this has happened before, and will happen again."

Kara had just enough time to register that Dee would _never_ in a million years quote scripture at her, when--

A knock at the door.

Without looking up from her desk, Socrata yelled, "It's open."

It was always open.

Kara watched herself step into her mother's apartment. Watched her younger incarnation smile politely; watched her wonder silently (but not invisibly) what sort of day her mother was having and whether she could expect stony praise or sharp, biting mockery.

The question itself was a trap. It was always both.

"Hello, momma," said Kara's younger self.

She couldn't do this. The planet had been irradiated and everyone on it was either dead or gone; how much farther did she need to run to escape her mother's ghost?

She'd never gone back. But she'd looked back, more times than she could count. Her mother's words had rung in her ears for weeks.

_All that natural ability, and still you only graduated sixteenth in your class._

_Why are you proud of that? You should have been number one._

Every time she'd closed her eyes she'd seen the contempt on Socrata's face as she tore Kara to pieces for the last time.

_You're a quitter. You always have been._

She didn't want to do this again.

But she was here now, and that younger Kara Thrace deserved a witness. Even if there was nothing else she could do, she could stand here and watch.

Even if her past self had no idea anyone was there. Even if, maybe, no one was.

"I'm gonna walk out that door," new-fledged Starbuck declared, "and you can look at it every frakkin' miserable day you have left and know that I am never going to come back through it again."

Her mother called after her, frightened and old. "Kara! Kara!"

Kara had never gone back.

And Socrata had died.

She'd forgotten Dee was there until she laid her hand gently on Kara's shoulder. "You kept running, didn't you? For blocks."

She'd run for a lot more than blocks. She'd run as far and as fast as the fleet would take her, while Socrata's life counted down like a broken clock that measured in cigarettes and heartbeats instead of seconds.

 _"_ She waited here five weeks," Dee said softly, as if Kara didn't already know, "hoping you'd come back. Your mother didn't know--"

Kara didn't mean to interrupt her, but the words tore out of her anyway. "I was afraid. I couldn't watch."

"Your mother didn't know how to love you," Dee said, and this time Kara almost did snap at her because _how stupid exactly did she think Kara was?--_ "but that's because she never loved herself. That's _her_ flaw, not yours. You were never a cancer, Kara. What your mother thought she knew wasn't always true."

Kara shook her head. "It doesn't matter if she was wrong to say it. I ran. And Zak--" She didn't know how to say, _I killed him. I held that beautiful man's life in my hands, and he trusted me, and I got him killed. Just like I hurt everyone who gets close enough._

"You didn't kill Zak," Dee said, as if Kara had spoken. "Or do you think Lee's killed you now?"

"No." There was no question of Lee's culpability. "I flew into the Eye. It was my decision, not Lee's."

"Zak's choice was his own," Dee told her. "You couldn't have changed that."

"I could have kept him out of a frakking viper!"

Dee nodded. "And Lee could have grounded you today."

"But he didn't. Because he believed in me." She glanced across the room to her mother's empty desk, littered in papers and butts. " _She_ could have told him. No one should ever have faith in me doing the right thing."

"I don't think that's what your mother would have told Lee."

"Then you don't know her very well."

"Neither do you." Dee shook her head slowly. "But it's not too late. She's waiting, still."

 

* * *

The folding doors slid open more silently than Kara had remembered, and her mother looked small, so small, lying in that big bed. Waiting.

"Momma--"

 

* * *

 

When Socrata was gone, when Kara had cried, Dee came into the room and settled next to her on her mother's blue down comforter.

"See," Dee said. "There's nothing so terrible about death. When you finally face it, it's beautiful. You're free now. To become who you really are."

Still holding her mother's hand, Kara smiled and said what she'd been thinking all along. "You're not Dee."

"Never said I was." She smiled back and for a moment, Kara thought she could see universes unfolding and collapsing in Dee's eyes. "I'm here to prepare you to pass through the next door. To discover what hovers in the space between life and death."

Kara might have been imagining the breeze that swept into her mother's windowless bedroom, or the way it whipped her hair out of her face and hissed against her cheeks until it grew hard to breathe. It could almost have been something out of a dream, except... except for the faint hint of ozone, like every ship put out in atmosphere, that rode along with the gust of wind.

Why would she smell--

Oh.

She was still in her viper.

But if she was still in her viper, spinning out of control through the atmo of an unnamed gas giant, and Lee was still chasing her through the storm--

"What about us?" she asked Dee.

Dee smiled. "I don't have all the answers."

Of course not. But-- "What about us, and Sam, and Lee?"

Dee--or whoever it was that wore Dee's face--laughed, lighthearted and peaceful. "You'll have to find out for yourself."

Kara blinked, and Dee was gone.

 

* * *

 

She came back to herself in the cockpit of her viper, Lee's voice frantic and almost unintelligible in her ear. "Starbuck, Apollo. Lost you on DRADIS. I say again--" He cut out in static for a few beats. "--fix on you. Kara!"

The wind in her face burned, even through her helmet. She knew she must be hallucinating the sensation but it felt damn real, air in her face and ozone and godsdamn _destiny_.

Everything was moving--layers in the gas giant, layers of the galaxy, all of it parting and twisting around her. Each flash of lightning illuminated a new landscape of clouds. There were no bearings for her to find. She was a fish on a line, pulled inexorably toward something, something--oh, why kid herself, pulled toward the _Eye_.

It was simple now. It was easy, now that she knew.

In the midst of the storm, suddenly, she could be the calm.

"Lee," she said, still holding her mother's hand, still holding onto Dee's (not Dee's) faith. "I'm not afraid anymore."

She remembered Lee, the other Lee, looking her in the eye and saying, _Whatever happens, I believe in you._

In his viper, the real Lee was conspicuously silent. Then he barked, "Say again?"

"Tell Sam I'm not afraid anymore."

"Kara," he said, "listen to me. Forget the damn toaster. _Climb now_ or you're dead."

Everything was light, and breath, and a sense of peace the like of which she had never felt before. Her viper was accelerating without her guidance down into the storm, into the Eye, into her fate.

She'd lied to Lee. She was still afraid. But she knew why, now, and the fear didn't matter.

Lee yelled, "Godsdamnit, where are you?" Then, a moment later, "Visual! Visual. Okay, Kara, I'm coming to get you."

He wasn't going to catch her. All of this had happened before.

"Lee," she told every version of him, "I'll see you on the other side."

"Kara, please, listen to me! Come back!"

Oh, Lee. "Just let me go."

"Godsdamn it, Kara!" His voice broke in her ear. "You come back! Come back!"

"It's okay." And it was. "Just let me go. They're waiting for me." She closed her eyes against the brilliance. "Dee--"


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter has a few lines from episode 3.17, but we're mostly moving into uncharted territory (finally!) with Dee.
> 
> My love for Dee runneth over, and also my love for everyone reading this. <3 <3

Dee had listened to the audio of Kara's last CAP twice, and she still couldn't figure out why Kara had said her name at the end.

Alone in the quarters she shared with Lee, Dee shifted forward on the edge of the couch to halt the playback as the little white digits rolled on into static.

It made no sense. But then, how often did Kara make sense?

Frakking never. But Kara had said Dee's name before she died. And no one else seemed to have noticed.

She supposed Sam might have realized it. He'd requested access to the comm log a few days after Kara's death, and Dee had sent Gaeta to bring him a copy of the recording and a handheld playback device, twin of the one she was staring at now. Using Gaeta as an intermediary seemed best for everyone--no need to rub salt in any wounds. But Sam had loved Kara, too, and he had every right to hear her final moments.

Certainly more right than Dee did. And yet.

She hadn't listened to the log herself until weeks later. She hadn't wanted to wonder what the frak Kara had been thinking, why she'd followed some imaginary bogey into a storm for no reason except her own stubbornness and--

Somehow, for some reason, Kara had said Dee's name right before her viper hit the hard deck and blew up.

Dee cycled the recording back to 2602:112:14:58:53:500, settled into the couch, and started the playback for a third time.

"I'm not afraid any more," Kara said.

There was Lee, incredulous: "Say again?"

"Tell Sam I'm not afraid any more."

Dee rested her elbows on her knees and leaned forward during the long silent gap on the log, chin in her hands. The timestamp on the audio plowed unerringly through the milliseconds. In the CIC, Tigh had been snapping angry witticisms about how Kara should have the sense to be afraid; the Admiral had been rooting her on as if Kara could hear him, and--

"Godsdamn it, Kara," Lee shouted suddenly. "Pull up now. We can still pull out of this, we haven't gone past the point of no return. Pull up!"

Gaeta had been firing off instructions that Dee blearily remembered transmitting to the other pilots as they shot from their launch tubes, and then--

"Just let me go. They're waiting for me. Dee--"

It was just as wrenching as the first time she'd heard it. What the frak had Kara been thinking?

"No! No!" Lee sobbed as if his heart was being torn out through his chest.

Another long pause--the Admiral had been giving orders. Then Lee barked, "Negative, she went in. She went in. No, Dad, it's no use. Her ship's in pieces." She could hear the rawness in his voice, the jagged edges that told her he was fighting tears. Dee bowed her head almost to the coffee table and reminded herself to breathe. "Her ship's in pieces. No chute. We lost her."

She paused the playback, rested her head in her hands, and decided again that she wasn't going to cry over Kara Frakking Thrace.

People who burned as brightly as Kara weren't supposed to die, damn it. They were born to set off explosions, move on with the shock wave, and leave fallout in their wake, but they weren't ever, ever, supposed to die.

Kara should have been immortal. She should have outlived them all.

Dee wasn't going to cry. She wasn't.

Godsdamn Kara, and her frakking visions, and her absurd ability to take up so much space that when she was gone you felt like your internal organs might collapse into the hole she'd left behind.

It wasn't as if Dee had anything left to mourn. There was nothing between her and Kara now except scar tissue. They'd never had a chance in hell of, what, recovering those blissful couple of months in college? Oh, please, save that kind of thinking for terrible pulp fiction. Even after Kara's break with reality last month, Dee had known better than to expect anything other than trouble from her. Kara was--and always had been--a beautiful disaster. You could decide to love her enough not to care about the mess, but that didn't make the casualties vanish. They just got swept away by Kara's vicious smile.

And look. Visions and gods, and Kara had still managed to leave a shitstorm behind for everyone who loved her.

Dee hadn't wanted to believe in Kara's visions, but she didn't quite dare disbelieve them, either. No matter what she'd told Kara, no matter her own lack of faith, she knew Kara believed in the gods--really believed, in a way Dee had never understood and didn't want to. If Kara said she'd been sent a vision, then she'd seen something.

Maybe Kara had finally cracked. Maybe Leoben had broken her on New Caprica. But she wouldn't have lied about an experience like that.

And if Kara wasn't insane, what the frak had she thought she was doing flying into a hurricane?

And, worst and most insidious question of all, could Dee have somehow stopped her? If she had listened, if she had believed in Kara's stupid visions, would Kara still be alive?

Why hadn't she _listened_?

Godsdamn it, Kara.

She heard the door to their quarters open and shut, followed by the sound of Lee dogging the hatch. He always did and she never understood why. What was he worried about, theft on a battlestar? Who was going to rob the Admiral's son?

Who the frak cared, anyway, if someone did.

She straightened up on the couch as he turned to face her.

"Hey," he said softly.

"Hey."

After an awkward beat he stepped into the middle of the room, shrugging out of his uniform jacket and tossing it over a chair.

She closed her eyes and let the soft, ordinary sounds of Lee moving through their quarters wash over her as if she could will everything normal again. As if they could somehow go back to the happiness they'd had a few weeks ago, when things were almost good between them.

Back when Kara was still alive.

Oblivious to her thoughts, Lee cleared his throat. When she opened her eyes, he was standing in front of his closet and staring at her. "I was thinking of meeting the Chief for a drink later. Wondered if you'd want to join us."

"Thanks, but I think I'd rather stay in."

She didn't mean to be cold. She knew that he was trying. Lee didn't have it in him to just give up--Adamas weren't wired for fatalism. He kept making halfhearted attempts to reach out to her since Kara's funeral, not realizing that it could never be enough.

It wasn't fair. It wasn't right.

And Dee had no idea how to look at Lee, much less how to talk to him about Kara.

 

* * *

 

She hated herself a little for how often she'd detoured to pass through Memorial Hallway, searching for Kara's photo. (That was a lie; she hated herself more than a little.) It had taken three weeks for a photo to go up, but now Kara lounged insouciantly in her civvies right next to a formal shot of Kat in her flight suit--foils to the end. Dee thought they'd both be pleased.

She told herself she didn't want to know who had put the picture there--but Kara looked so damn young, grinning cheekily at the photographer, that it almost had to have been Lee.

Who else had photos of Kara just lying around?

The Admiral must have some. But he wouldn't flaunt his memories here.

And if Sam had pictures of Kara, she thought he would have posted one weeks ago.

Lee, though. Lee would have carefully chosen a photo before the funeral, then carried it on his person for days or weeks until he was ready to share it; waiting until he was able to give even that little piece of Kara to the rest of Galactica to mourn.

Would he have held on as tightly if it had been Dee in that viper, if it was her photograph smiling down from Memorial Wall today? Would he have referred to Dee as _his hero_ and cried in the middle of speaking at her funeral?

She ran her fingers along the edge of Kara's photo.

...Yes, she thought. He would have mourned her just the same.

All the games and jealousies of the past few months seemed trivial now--worse than trivial. Oh, it was easy to point at Kara, to blame her for loving too many people and refusing to love any of them well enough to give up the rest. Easy to blame her for being messy and out of control and selfish.

But as much as she'd resented Kara's arrival on Galactica, Dee was the one who'd gone and got herself involved with Lee.

She liked to think she would have noticed Lee anyway--but she hadn't. She'd noticed him because he was with Kara. Not _with_ Kara, Dee could tell fact from fiction in Galactica's rumor mill--but it was obvious from watching them that they cared about each other. Kara would laugh at the far end of a room and Dee's eyes would be drawn to her. And always, always, Lee was at Kara's side with his quiet chuckle, and his beautiful face, and. Well.

Kara alone was indomitable and unavoidable; together, Lee and Kara were magnetic. She hadn't wanted to look away.

Sometimes she wondered what might have happened if Lee had been there with them in military college instead of Karl. She might never have stood a chance with Cadet Starbuck if Apollo had been around. Or maybe Dee would have set her eye, not on Kara, but on Lee. (Would it have been settling to have decided Kara was something stratospheric and not for mere mortals, and fallen for Lee instead? Was it settling that she'd done it years later, after Kara, after the Cylons, after Baltar had won the election--was it settling then to grab onto the single piece of joy she'd imagined she could have for herself, and hold it so tightly she'd crushed it to death with her bitterness and her fear?)

Either way, any which way, really, it would have been a different world.

How many times did she force herself, in those first days after the Cylons invaded, to focus on her lunch or her work, only to have her attention drawn inexorably back to Kara--always Kara, and usually Kara and Lee. There was no avoiding them--in the CIC, in the mess, on duty with their voices in her ear as they flew CAP. They were everywhere, laughing and joking and flirting and in her ear, always in her ear.

Frak them and their omnipresence. If she'd wanted to get away from Kara--and sometimes she genuinely did--then the end of the world had been the most backwards sort of slap in the face from a universe that refused to let her escape Starbuck's orbit.

It wasn't that she was pining after Kara. Gods, it had been years, the thought of still carrying a torch was humiliating. But they were stuck on the same ship, survivors of the same genocide, and Kara was always going to be Kara: outrageous, unavoidable, and most of all, loud. Half the crew knew about it when Kara had slept with Gaius Baltar, and half the crew knew back then--despite rumors to the contrary--that Kara wasn't sleeping with Lee.

 It was hard to keep secrets on a battlestar. Harder now, after the end of the world.

And then Baltar had won the election, despite all of their best (and worst) efforts, and the end of the world had come again.

And in the meantime, Dee had married Lee, and Kara had married Sam, and everyone was nicely paired off and nicely miserable. Good job, all of them.

Maybe Kara was right. Maybe her utterly insane scheme really would have fixed things.

But you don't fix relationships, and you don't fix people. You have to simply love them.

The way Dee had loved Kara. The way, she'd thought once upon a simpler time, Kara had loved her.

But that was a long time ago.

 

* * *

 

She only realized how long she'd been staring at Kara's photo when the approach of heavy, uneven footsteps jarred her from her thoughts.

She brushed her fingers one more time over Kara's stupid smile as she stepped back from the wall--and froze as her brain caught up with her ears.

Uneven...? Oh, shit. It couldn't be Sam.

It was Sam. Of frakking course.

He came around the corner unsteadily, all six foot something of him on a walking boot and crutches, while she stood frozen in front of Kara's picture. His gaze swept over her, took in the two knuckledraggers talking quietly at the far end of the hall, then returned to Dee.

"Hey." He nodded. "Dee."

"Sam." He was so tall, and had so much presence. She always forgot how damn tall he was until she was standing in front of him. "How are you?"

Sam glanced past her blankly as he made his shambling way down the hall and stopped beside her. _How are you?_ Could she have found anything more banal to say to Kara Thrace's widower?

"I'm," Sam said eventually, after a long pause in which Dee regretted ever having opened her mouth, "I'm here." Here seemed to encompass _in Memorial Hallway to visit Kara_ , and also, _alive_. He didn't sound thrilled at either prospect.

"Yeah," she agreed. Her eyes flew back to Kara, grinning in all her manic, short-haired glory, stuck on the wall next to Kat for all time.

Or at least until Galactica got blown up by the toasters.

There was a moment in which neither of them spoke and they both stared at Kara's photo. It was awkward; how could it be anything but?

Without looking at Sam, she muttered, "It isn't right."

"No," he agreed. "It really isn't."

"You look like you could use a drink," she observed, before she could talk herself out of the impulse.

"I really could," Sam agreed. "You buying?"

"Sure," she said. "We'll toast Kara."

"Okay," he said. He nodded once. "Okay."


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the part where it goes gleefully off the rails a bit. I have no regrets.

Joe's was loud after the near-silence of Memorial Hallway, and crowded. Dee regretted extending the offer as soon as she and Sam crossed the threshold from the flight deck but by then it was too late to renege.

"There's a table back there," she raised her voice to tell Sam, who nodded. "I'll catch up to you."

She made for the bar and rested her elbows on its pitted surface to wait.

This was such a bad idea. What were they even going to talk about?

Kara. They were going to wind up talking about Kara, and it wasn't going to end well.

"What can I getcha?" Charlie Connor asked sourly from the other side of the bar. It would have to be Charlie--in case she imagined any part of this day might be about to go smoothly.

"Two of whatever's not cheapest," she told him. "You can add it to our tab."

"Joe's gonna want that paid up soon."

"Fine." She nodded. Lee had given Joe a book two weeks ago, something old and worth enough to keep them in drinks for months, but Charlie wouldn't believe her if she said so. "Next time I'm in."

He turned to one of the stills under the counter and decanted two short glasses of something almost colourless, setting them on the bar in front of Dee with a skeptical look. "The Major said the same when he was here earlier."

"Then you know one of us will pay Joe." She picked up the glasses and walked away.

She made her way across the deck, weaving between chairs and dodging elbows. In the centre of the open floor space two of the biggest tables had been jammed together with a piece of sheet metal between them to form, of all things, a haphazard table tennis rig. Someone had built a pair of paddles out of what looked like discarded medical equipment and scraps of an old uniform, and a crowd of pilots were gathering around, jostling for who'd play next.

On another day, Kara and Sam would have been right in the thick of it, she thought. Instead, Kara was dead and Sam was waiting for Dee at a table in the corner, his crutches leaned casually against the wall, waving people off as they tried to convince him to join the game.

"C'mon, Sam!" Jean Barolay called as Dee passed her.

"On one foot?" he said skeptically, pointing to his crutches. "I think I'll pass."

"Your loss," she grinned, then backed away with a dismissive moue when she saw Dee on her way over.

"What's this?" Sam asked when Dee put a glass in front of him.

"Didn't ask." She settled into the empty seat with a shrug.

"I always order whatever's Joe's got that's pretending to be whiskey, but this might be more of a vodka," Sam said, lifting it toward the light. He took a cautious sip and chased it with a wince.

"Ugh, it's horrible," Dee agreed, raising her glass after an initial taste.

"To Kara," Sam said neutrally.

"To Kara." She forced her eyes to her drink, wishing for any other topic of conversation.

As if he'd read her mind, Sam gestured behind her to the ping-pong table. "You'd think they were playing pyramid. Ping-pong shouldn't be a contact sport."

She snorted. "Try reining that crowd in."

"Please. I know better," he retorted with a grin that almost reached his eyes. She wondered if he'd already been drinking before he made his way to Memorial Hallway; it would explain the looseness of his posture, the strange intimacy of him being here with her at all.

"Hmmm," she said, drawing the syllable out as if lost in thought. "The infamous Sam Anders, intimidated by a bunch of rowdy snipes and viper jocks. Who'd have imagined?"

"Not intimidated," he said, halfway to a laugh. "But realistic."

"That explains why you married Kara."

"Hey, she asked me!" he said. "I'm not an idiot. Would you have said no?"

Dee froze.

"I've said no to Kara a few times," she told him carefully.

"That's right," he said. "You knew each other in college, didn't you?"

"Yeah," she agreed, taking another sip to hide her reaction. It burned all the way down.

"She grumbled about you and Helo and CMA a lot."

"I doubt that," she said, staring into her glass.

"--When she wasn't spouting off about wild visions." He threw the words out like bait and then paused--deliberately, she thought. To see what he'd catch.

Frak damn.

She met his eyes with an unnameable rage simmering under her skin. "She told you."

"And you, apparently. But not Lee."

That figured, but--"How do you know she didn't?"

"I felt him out earlier today," he said as if poking at his dead wife's other lover to find out what he had or hadn't known about her hallucinations was no big deal. Maybe, to Sam, it wasn't. "Thought he'd been the one to send me Kara's CAP recording. But that was you, too."

"I have all the audio accesses," she admitted.

"Thank you."

"Of course," she told him. "You had as much right as anyone."

He shook his head. "Except maybe you."

"Bullshit."

"Why'd she say your name, Dee?"

"I don't frakking know," she said bitterly, pushing her chair back from the table with a harsh scrape against the deck plates. "But if we're doing this, I'm getting another drink first."

She came back--against her better judgment--with a double for each of them.

"This is a bad idea," she told him with a frown, throwing back half of her glass without tasting it. "We're both going to hear things we don't need to know."

"Maybe, maybe not," Sam said with a shrug. She wished she knew him better so she could read his hooded expression. "What do you know about Kara's visions?"

Dee groaned. "She said she'd seen the Pegasus, in some other world where the four of us were a group instead of two pair marriages. She told you the same?"

"Yeah." Sam nodded. "The very same."

"She cornered me in the CIC and we had an argument over it, about two weeks before--" She choked on the second half of the sentence, downed the rest of her drink, and accepted Sam's glass when he nudged it toward her. "A little over a month ago, now. That's all."

It wasn't, not by a long shot, but it was all she was going to give him.

"I told her to talk to you," he said softly. At her sharp look, he clarified, "To you and Lee."

"Why?"

"I... she... I wanted her to be happy. She said--" He glanced at the ping-pong players and then away across the room.

Dee snorted. "She said we were all happy there."

He nodded slowly. "I think it was the way she said it. I haven't seen her so certain since--" He caught himself, looking so shattered at the slip up that Dee ached. "Hadn't. I hadn't seen her so certain. Not since New Caprica."

Dee didn't know what to say. "She deserved better than this."

"We all deserved better than this." He met her gaze and she was suddenly all too aware of his sharp blue eyes, creasing at the corners; the muscled bulk of his shoulders; his ridiculous athlete's build. Holy shit. She was attracted to Sam Anders.

"If I was Kara, we'd be frakking right now, wouldn't we?" she asked stupidly, three shots on an empty stomach having neatly bypassed her verbal filter.

Sam's smile only grew. "Well, yeah."

"No, I mean even if I wasn't Kara-your-wife, just Kara, in a bar..."

Sam eyed her appreciatively. It had been a long time, Dee thought, since anyone other than Lee had looked at her like that, with the overt interest of a man who knew he could get laid if he wanted to--and he wanted to.

"...Yeah," Sam said eventually, and not without some smugness.

"Damn you, Kara," she muttered, and nudged Sam's glass back toward his hand. "Uh. Sorry."

Sam didn't say anything, just shrugged and took another sip of the rotgut vodka.

"For what it's worth," Sam said slowly, and he was either more drunk than he had any right to be or he was emphasizing this for a reason. Maybe both. "For what it's worth, I think Kara may have been onto something."

Dee stared at him for a few seconds. "Dare you to say that to Lee."

"Dare you to tell him about Kara's visions," he said in return, raising his glass to her.

She laughed. It hurt less than it should have done.

 

* * *

 

Alone in their empty quarters the next morning, she thought about Kara's stupid self-centeredness, and how Lee never seemed to be home, and what an unexpected dork Sam had turned out to be once you got him going.

"You have to understand," he'd insisted, about five drinks in, when everything was starting to blur pleasantly and Dee was really having to focus if she wanted to follow what Sam was saying. "The game's called pyramid for a reason."

"It is?" she'd asked skeptically, because surely if there was a meaning behind the name somebody would have told her in college, sometime in the whirlwind months she'd spent hanging off of Kara and her athlete friends.

"It abser--" He paused for a second. "Absolutely is. A tetrahedron is the strongest shape, you know."

She nodded as if she had the foggiest idea what he was talking about.

"Four sides, four corners. Perfect balance, perfect symmetry, and almost indestructible."

She nodded again. "Like synthetic crystal lattices."

"Yeah. It's math," he said, delighted with himself in the way only drunk people can be.

"I'm still not sure that explains why they named the game--"

"Frak the game. Pyramid was my life, I love it, I always will. But that's not my point."

She stared at him blankly and wondered again what she was doing here in Joe's bar, in the wild hours of the morning, getting drunk with Kara's widower.

"Four sides, four corners. We could have been indestructible, Dee."

Oh.

Oh, crap.

"I know," she said softly.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry about the irregular posting schedule, but I hope this batch of chapters will be worth the wait!
> 
> A couple of notes:
> 
> This might be a good point in the story to read the prequels if you have any interest in them: There are a few references coming up to earlier events, esp Dee's backstory as told in [Even when I give it all away, I want it all](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11610057/chapters/26100195).
> 
> fwiw I've also changed the series order to chronological rather than posting order--hope it's clearer this way!

And then there was Baltar's trial, and Dee hadn't realized how much worse things could get until they were already slipping off the rails.

Knowing that her husband was defending that despicable worm had been bad enough. Now, though, Lee seemed content to throw Roslin to the wolves to do it--and for what? To defend the man who'd sold out the human race to the Cylons so he could party on Colonial One?

Lee's cross-exam of President Roslin was enough to force Dee out of her seat, to drive her back to their quarters and then decisively out of them again. She needed to keep moving, didn't want to think this through or change her mind. She packed a bag, told Lee she was leaving, and then she left.

Her old rack in her old duty locker couldn't possibly be empty--not after two years--but it was as good a place to start as any. If there was nothing free there, she'd find an unclaimed rack somewhere on the same hall, or maybe bunk in with the deck hands. She wasn't frakking helpless.

If she were to ask, Tigh or the Old Man would find her a rack in a heartbeat--but she didn't need to ask. They were both busy and then some with the security concerns around Baltar's trial, and besides--she'd made a choice, and she could take care of herself downstream of that choice. She'd left Lee but she still had options.

She just hoped her old rack was free.

And to think that a little over a week ago she'd been fighting back tears for Kara. Now she was too angry to cry for herself.

Damn Lee and damn his faith in the system to the seven hells.

She'd been so stupid.

How had she ever, what had she been thinking--

She threw open the door to her duty locker--hers, the one she'd lived in for years before Leland Adama ever landed his father's raptor on Galactica's godsforsaken deck--and almost cried with relief when she spotted an unclaimed rack. It was in the middle of the aft wall, on the opposite side from her old bunk, but that was fine. She could stay here. She'd be fine.

She crammed her bag into the locker, grabbed workout gear, got changed in under sixty seconds, and made her way to the gym.

 

* * *

 

She went back once Lee was on duty to move the rest of her meager possessions to her new--old--duty locker. Walking into their quarters again left her feeling hollow. She hated being there, hated the reminders of Lee that lay scattered like bloody thumbprints on every surface. Hated that she could smell Gaius frakking Baltar's lawyer's cologne hanging in the stale air.

She stuffed the last of her clothes into her second bag and shoved everything down. The zipper slid shut smoothly and irrevocably.

On her way out the door, she snagged the history book the Admiral had given her as a wedding present off of Lee's bookshelf--it was hers and she'd damn well hang onto it--and crammed it into an outer pocket on her duffel before swinging the strap over her shoulder.

She turned around one final time, surveying the quarters she'd shared with her husband for the past year. Sometimes she missed Commander's quarters on Pegasus, but she didn't think she was going to miss these rooms. Had she ever been happy here? Or had she only been pretending it was worth hanging on for as long as Lee would let her?

He hadn't left her for Kara. Against all reason, Lee had stayed. And Kara had died, and now Dee was the one leaving.

Because of course their marriage couldn't survive Kara. Of frakking course not.

 

* * *

 

Dee kept busy. She joined Felix's weekly triad game; she worked out with Karl. She babysat Hera, stepping in as usual when neither of the Agathons could be home--more regularly now, since Karl had relieved Tigh as acting XO, while the Admiral was still tied up in Baltar's trial. Dee didn't envy Karl the job or the political shitstorm after Tigh's breakdown on the stand.

She found her thoughts wandering more often than she wanted to admit to the broken look in Lee's eyes when she'd walked out. To Kara's final moments and all the things Dee wished she'd said differently, or wished she could scrub out of her brain. Except--she'd made herself a promise, back in college, back when it all began. _No regrets._

And even if she hadn't, well--she still wouldn't change the past. Because if she hadn't been with Kara in college, she would never have known how good it could be to like and love and be insanely attracted to someone, and she might have married Billy when he asked her.

Or maybe she never could have married Billy. (Sweet Billy, Billy who had made her smile, who had been her balm in the desert of destruction after the fall of the Colonies; Billy who had been good, and safe, and true. Billy, who she had never loved the same way he'd loved her.)

It would have been harder to know that, though, if she hadn't had Kara first. Being with Kara had burned away the part of Dee that worried, that doubted--the inner voice that had wondered, even after Dee landed on Caprica and started military training, whether it might have been better to have forced down her doubts, to have stayed on Sagittaron and married Clay and kept the peace. She couldn't have done it and stayed sane, but maybe she should have done it anyway.

Before Kara, she was afraid to want anything in case the reality life had in store for her was a bland, inadequate substitute for her dreams. Growing up on West Sagittaron hadn't left much room for imagination. If you weren't a fool, you took what the gods gave and you lived your life in service, and you were grateful.

Dee was a fool, though. She was foolish deep down, and she had thumbed her nose at them all and left--and then she'd feared, at first, that she was doomed to lead a boring, unsatisfying life in spite of that act of defiance. Maybe she was a boring person and would only ever have sad, small experiences to show for herself.

Maybe she'd thrown it all away for nothing.

After Kara, though, she'd never doubted that there was something worth striving for--that there was better out there, if you were brave enough to seek it out.

If you were fool enough to try.

 

* * *

 

"You're faster," Karl said, dodging a punch and circling behind Dee on the mats. "Have you been sparring with--" He cut himself off and made a halfhearted pass at her arm.

She pulled out of his reach. "With...?"

He shrugged apologetically. "I was gonna say with Lee, but..."

"Not likely." She leapt out of range of his kick, and dove in to land a punch against his side.

He winced. "Then who's your new sparring partner?"

"No one," she told him, bewildered--until she remembered the two nights last week she'd spent battering Kara's favourite punching bag.

The big trial had loomed like a storm cloud on the horizon for weeks, and she'd been too wound up after her shift to sleep; she couldn't stop thinking about Baltar and his slimy lawyer sitting on her furniture, poking around her quarters. She'd gone to the gym looking for someone to spar with and her eyes had landed on the old punching bag--abandoned, now that Kara was gone, as if her death might somehow be contagious.

If it was, Dee thought, death could come and take her.

She'd never spent much time on a punching bag before, but she knew how. No time like the present.

A couple of sessions with a bag shouldn't have made enough difference to her speed for Karl to notice, but she hadn't changed anything else. Frak if she wanted to announce that out loud, though, and Karl would just keep pushing until she gave him something, so--

"I'm meeting Sam for a drink later," she panted as she spun away from a low grappling move that'd caught her off guard in the past. "You wanna join us?"

"Sam Anders?" He backed off with a look that she could only interpret as cautionary, and she laughed, warm and familiar. Karl always had tried to protect her from her own bad judgment. He'd warned her away from Kara when they were in college, and later from Lee. Add Sam to that list and she'd have the full set.

Well, and it'd distract Karl from her late-night insomniac punching bag exploits, which had been the whole point.

She shrugged. "Or don't."

"Nah, I'm in," he said. "What time?"

"Twenty-one hundred," she said with a grin. "Or is that too late for you, now that you're an old man with a kid?"

"That'll be fine," he said, very dry, and came at her again.

 

* * *

 

 

Karl was oddly quiet as they made their way to the showers. Maybe she was living in the past, but Dee kept expecting him to say something about Sam--something like he'd said when he'd first noticed Lee smiling at her across the gym, some three years ago.

"You and your pilots, man," Karl had muttered after Lee left the gym, and she'd almost frozen in the middle of the sparring floor--the same one they'd grappled on today, back when the mats had had enough padding left to do more than mark out an area on the deck plates.

"Shaddup!" she'd hissed, blushing furiously, and Karl had laughed.

"We both know you aren't going to listen if I try to warn you about getting your heart broken by another hotshot pilot."

"You're married to a Cylon, Karl. I don't think you get to give anyone dating advice."

"Low blow, Dee. Low blow."

She raised one eyebrow the way she'd picked up from him, back in their student days.

" _Anyway_." He stuck his tongue out. "I wish you all the best with Lee. Dee and Lee. Dee-Lee, Lee-Dee. It has a nice ring to it--and by nice I mean terrible, of course."

She'd punched him in the arm and he'd let her wipe the floor with him, laughing the whole time. It had been a good day.

It had been a long time, now, since Dee had had a good day.

 

* * *

 

It was surprisingly easy, grabbing drinks with Karl and Sam, the conversation effortless in a way human contact hadn't been for Dee in... a while now. Except for Karl, of course, but she'd known him for so long that he hardly counted as people.

She wasn't surprised when, finishing up their second round, Karl pushed his glass to the middle of the table and said, "I'm turning in. Some of us are on duty at 0600."

Sam nodded. "Good to see you, Helo."

"You too." Karl leaned into Dee's space as he rose and muttered, "Be careful."

"Careful is overrated," she muttered darkly.

She knew the look Karl was giving her without having to see it, but was a bit shocked when he leaned in without warning and kissed her on the top of her head.

By the time she'd schooled her expression and looked up, he was already walking away.

"I can tell the two of you go way back," Sam observed.

"Karl is the big brother that I wish my real brothers had been."

She thought that might have been oversharing, but Sam just smiled. "It's sweet, you know."

"Thanks?"

"I'm glad you have somebody from your past."

She choked on a startled laugh. "Karl's not from--he never met my _past_. He only knows the person I became after I walked out on my childhood."

Sam nodded acknowledgment. "I never had anyone from mine," he told her. "Grew up in an orphanage. On Picon," he added as her eyes widened. "They took good care of abandoned kids there. I didn't want for much. Except family, of course. A place to fit."

"I'd have traded you in a heartbeat," she said, and immediately regretted it. "No, I wouldn't. That's a terrible thing to say."

"It's all right."

"No, it's not," she told him. "I hated everything about my childhood, in the end, but I don't mean to say that it's worse than what you went through."

"Worse is that we both lost Kara."

Dee nodded, met his raised glass with hers, and drank.

"I'm thinking of training as a pilot," he told her serenely, once he'd drained his cup.

" _Sam_." She didn't ask why. "That sounds... like a really nice idea, actually."

"I knew you'd see it."

"I do." She watched him rub at his upper arm, unselfconsciously stroking the lines of his pair tattoo--unpaired now, an unmatched half without a whole. "I'm not sure Kara would understand it, but I do."

"I need to be closer to her," he said--softly, as if he was embarrassed. "And I need something to do, to--"

"I get it. You'll do great out there."

He chuckled humourlessly. "Or I'll die in a viper, like Kara."

"Don't."

"What's it like?" he asked. "To have a place in this monstrosity?" He waved one hand in a way that encompassed, what? Galactica? The entire fleet?

"Hey, that's my ship you're disrespecting," she hazarded, and he grinned.

"You know what I mean. A place in this madness. You have a job here."

She shook her head, frowning. "Someone else could do my job. It's not like it's hard."

"Sure, someone else could do it. Not that I believe you that it isn't hard work, either. But this job is yours."

She thought of her bleakest days on Pegasus and the even bleaker ones since Kara's funeral, and how little she felt like anything she did mattered.

"I don't know about that," she told him softly.

"I do. Everyone on this ship knows and respects you. You're more important than you realize."

Maybe he was right, and maybe he wasn't. Either way, he was looking her in the eye and telling her she mattered, and that--that wasn't nothing.

"Thanks, Sam," she said carefully. "I don't know if I agree with you but I--thanks."

"Any time."


	14. Chapter 14

It had been a hard day. She had run into Lee--almost physically collided--in the middle of the CIC, after not speaking to each other in over a week. She hadn't known what to say, and he seemed more flustered than should have been possible, and having to pantomime cool post-breakup professionalism in front of two dozen pairs of watchful eyes was blatantly not their forte.

But it didn't matter. She was going to have a drink with Sam, and forget about Lee, and it would all be fine.

Gods, the days of upright young Dee, who didn't drink and didn't smoke and didn't understand why everyone else on every damn military boat _did,_ seemed incomprehensibly long ago.

She hadn't meant to dredge up more of the past, but somehow they'd moved from grousing about Kara's funeral ("I didn't want to give a eulogy," Sam told her bluntly, "but that doesn't mean I didn't want any say in it!") to talking about funeral traditions on their respective homeworlds, and next thing she knew she was telling Sam about the insanity of her last trip to Sagittaron, for Clay Abrams' funeral.

"I don't even know why I went," she said. "It's not like anyone was expecting me to show."

"Why not?"

"Why not?" She laughed mirthlessly. "I didn't leave Clay at the altar, but I did the next best thing--hopped on a military recruiting ship and disappeared a few months before our wedding."

"Ah."

"By the time I made it to Sagittaron I'd already missed the wake, and then I ducked out after the burial. Probably caused a scandal by being there at all."

"So why'd you go?"

She blew out a breath. "Clay meant something to me," she said at last, trying to find words to explain something she'd never expressed before. "And I still wouldn't have gone, except that Galactica was only half a system away at the time, and there was a passenger shuttle leaving at the right moment, and--I don't know. I couldn't not go, when I was already right there."

Sam nodded. "Did you love him?"

"I guess so," she admitted. "Not like--not like I loved Lee, or even Kara."

Sam rolled his eyes as if to say, _of course not,_ but didn't interrupt her.

"Clay and I never really knew each other," she told him with a shrug to acknowledge his point, "but I loved the--the idea of him. He seemed like a kind man. If it hadn't been for everything else--well. I could have been Clay's wife, but I couldn't be Missus Abrams. I would have broken under the weight of all their expectations."

"I felt that way once or twice, in--" he broke off with a frown and turned suddenly to glare behind him. "Where the frak is that music coming from?"

"What music?"

He shot her a look she couldn't read. "That song. Is there a radio in here?"

"I didn't see one." Or hear anything, but she hadn't really been paying attention.

"I've been hearing it all over the--"

A tinkling of glass shattering. Dee spun around in her seat in time to see the President's aide catch herself on the edge of a nearby table. Foster straightened, the remains of a tumbler crunching under her heels--so much for the last intact set of glassware on Galactica--and blinked in confusion, eyes wide and bloodshot.

"Are you all right?" Dee asked her.

"I hear it." Foster flapped one hand vaguely at Sam. Her clothes seemed creased enough to have been slept in, and her hair was all snarls and flyaways. "None of them along the line know what any of it is worth."

She cocked her head for a few seconds as if listening, then moved off slowly.

"So that was... strange," Dee said.

"Yeah," Sam agreed, still staring after Foster. "Someone get into the hard stuff early? No reason to get excited."

"I guess so," Dee agreed, shrugging off her unease as Joe came over to sweep up the broken glass.

 

* * *

 

"On Sagittaron, they called it Sedoretu." She set down their fresh glasses and slid into her chair. At Sam's querying look, she elaborated, "Group marriage. It's known as Sedoretu."

"That sounds... vaguely familiar."

"It's from one of the old texts. From Earth-that-was." She used the old Sagittaron phrase because--in for a cubit, in for a coin, right?

"On Picon," Sam said, "we mostly pretended group marriage didn't exist. Everyone talked like it was something the Capricans made up to make themselves seem more, umm. Worldly and sophisticated?"

"It isn't."

"No frakking kidding. I've met Sargeant Yates and her group."

"Who hasn't?" Dee laughed.

"Noisy frakkers."

The silence that stretched between them was soft and companionable, and Dee thought--not for the first time--how strange it was that she had never sought Sam out, had never seen him as a person in his own right until Kara was gone.

She took a deep breath, counted to ten, let it out. "Sedoretu is more complicated than group marriage, though."

" _Shocking_. Religious group marriage has _rules_?"

"Shut up," she said, trying not to grin into her glass. "On Caprica, groups get married and it's--well, who knows what happens behind closed doors but--"

"I'm guessing Sagittarons don't have a lot of tolerance for the 'free love, free orgy' sort of group marriage?"

"Not so much, no."

"Ha. So how do they spin it?"

She shook her head, trying to figure out how to simplify it enough to make sense to an offworlder. "So first of all, everyone is born into a moiety--Morning or Evening. It's pseudo-science at best. One of those personality trait indicators that boils down to people believing whatever they want to believe. So you're either Morning or Evening, and that determines how you dress, and what jobs you can have, and who you love, what sort of person you are."

Sam shook his head in disbelief. "Social classes, almost? Castes?"

"Like social castes, yeah. An Evening can't hold a Morning job. Or marry another Evening. Even in mono-marriages. Not that everyone on Sagittaron followed the moieties. But in the regions where we did, it was absolute. The rest were infidels, heathens. You wouldn't want to marry someone who didn't have a moiety, either."

"Huh."

"So group marriages are always done in even numbers, and always exactly half Morning and half Evening. And you're only allowed to sleep with the members of the moiety opposite yours."

Sam snorted. "What the frak? How do they know who you are or aren't sleeping with inside your own marriage?"

"Yeah, for sure. There's always muttering about the neighbours. But it's so deeply taboo. Even the thought of being attracted to someone of your own moiety is just--ugh, it makes the skin crawl." She couldn't quite say it made _her_ skin crawl, not any more. But she couldn't say it didn't, either.

"How were they assigned?"

"Depends where on Sagittaron you grew up. Sometimes it's assigned at birth, based on your mother's moiety. Sometimes it's a personality test in adolescence, or guessed from a child's behavior. I've heard of sects who have some kind of coming of age ritual for determining it--had. Damn. It's still hard to believe that's all gone."

"I know." He slid one hand across the table to where she was toying with a spoon, and gently stilled the anxious motion. "Which moiety are you?"

"Evening," she said without thinking. Of course she was still Evening.

Never mind that she'd joined the military (and _could you_ choose a more Morning career, Dee), no matter that she'd repudiated everything in her past. Never mind that she'd been second in command of a battlestar, that she'd fought Cylons and watched friends die. Sagittaron was gone and her family was gone and--she wasn't a _good_ Evening any more, and didn't want to be, but she was still Evening. That wouldn't change.

She was opening her mouth to say--something, she didn't know what--when Sam cocked an eyebrow at something behind her and smiled. She turned to see Lee sitting at the bar, staring conspicuously past them at the ping-pong tables and a darts set someone had put up on the wall. He hadn't been there ten minutes ago. She hadn't noticed him come in. The thought of not noticing Lee made her sad.

She realized she'd zoned out and missed Sam's words. "Sorry, what were you saying?"

"I said, I'd try to wave him over but I'm pretty sure he'll just frown at me."

"Let's try anyway." She giggled at Sam's exaggerated wave across the room, then winced as Lee turned to put his back to them.

"Welp." Sam raised his glass, tipped it toward the spectre of her husband. "To Lee."

"To Lee. Awful as he is."

Sam snorted into his glass, and she giggled again at the absurdity of--everything, really--and immediately wished she hadn't. Sam looked charmed, though, so she couldn't have been that terrible.

"When I was married to Lee--I mean we're still married, but..."

"I get it."

"When I was with him, we didn't talk like this."

He shook his head. "Like what?"

"I don't know. I mean, we talked."

"You mean you talked about Lee."

"Yeah."

"Been there," Sam said with a knowing smile.

"Oh yeah. With Kara, it was always about Kara." She felt a pang at exaggerating Kara's faults, but pushed it aside. So what if Kara had been there for Dee, in a really profound way, just once. That didn't erase everything that came after.

"Damn straight. And why wouldn't it be? I mean, _Kara_."

"Kara." They clicked glasses in midair. "I miss her, you know. I hated her guts, in the end, but I really miss her."

"Yeah."

Dee shook her head, annoyed at herself. "It's not right, being on Galactica without her. I miss Lee, too. Isn't that silly? I'm the one who's left him."

"Because he never talked about anything but Lee? Can't say I blame you for that."

"But you'd never have left Kara."

"No." His certainty was quiet but unshakeable. She envied him.

Maybe it was envy that made her ask, "Didn't you ever want more than that?"

"More than what? Playing second fiddle to Kara Thrace?" He sounded incredulous.

"Yeah. No. That part I get. I always did." She shook her head and realized, as the room spun a bit, that she was maybe past the point of pleasantly buzzed and into something a little darker, a little more raw. "I was happy coming second to Lee. I really, really was. That's not it."

"Coming second, eh?"

"Stop it. You. None of your business." She slapped his arm lightly and felt, again, that sizzle of attraction, the shiver up her spine that she wasn't supposed to feel because Sam was an Evening, like her, and not for her to touch. Or even want. "...Moieties. We were talking about moieties."

"I think that was a few twists and turns back."

"Whatever. You're Evening, too. That's why I'm not supposed to touch you."

"Not supposed to touch me? Or not supposed to frak me?"

"That," she muttered into her drink. "The latter. Yup."

"You weren't going to frak me anyway. 'Cause you're still married to Lee."

"What if I want to frak you _and_ Lee both?"

"The lady's got ambition." Sam shrugged. "I'm game. Lee's a hot piece. I could definitely do worse than the two of you."

That hadn't been quite what she'd meant, but--

Dee snorted in a way she'd only allow herself when she was really, truly, tipsy and headed toward drunk. She was sure this entire conversation was a bad idea in a world that made sense, or even in their usual nonsensical world when she was sober; right now, though, everything seemed balanced between something bright and golden and the fiercely hovering shadows, and she couldn't bring herself to care. "Right, but see. I'm Evening. You're Evening. I shouldn't want you. It isn't right."

Sam squinted at her like he was trying to make out the detail in the corner of a painting that would illuminate the entire scene. "What are Lee and Kara?"

"Morning moiety. Duh."

He laughed and the corners of his eyes crinkled up adorably. "So you can frak Kara, but not me?"

She wanted so badly to kiss the fine tracery of lines on his face. "Well, I did, didn't I?"

"You--what?" he asked, tone more in the neighbourhood of _how have I never heard about this before_ than _what the frak were you doing sleeping with my wife_. His reaction was kind of delicious--though she supposed it meant Kara hadn't told him nearly as much as she'd assumed.

"Oh, Sam," she said, patting his hand in a fashion that she'd meant to be reassuring but, she suspected distantly, was probably coming off as patronizing instead. She stilled her hand but left it atop his. He'd done it first, after all. "Kara and I slept together years ago. That ship has sailed. Sailed long and hard and, and--like the ocean."

"Dripping wet?"

She grinned. "I was thinking of waves. Big, deep sea waves. Also the destruction when they crash. Broken boats, broken houses. But wet, that too."

"I'm never going to be able to unhear any of this. You know that, right?"

"Good," she said, her hand still resting on his, and found she meant it.


	15. Chapter 15

Dee made her way down to Dogsville the next day, once the hangover fog had cleared, though she didn't quite let herself think about why.

She'd only been there a handful of times since they'd brought the refugees on board, and always for a purpose. It rattled her to see what remained of proud Sagittaron crammed into half of a hangar deck, left to wallow in their meagre survival, and there wasn't much to be done about it. Still, for no reason she could justify to herself, she made her way belowdecks and down corridors that she'd been avoiding for months.

She kept to the fringes once she reached Camp Oil Slick, hoping to stay inconspicuous. She had dressed in her blandest set of off-duty clothes and didn't mean to be noticed. She just wanted to remember, to breathe in the spices of home, even if home was--well.

Home didn't exist. She wasn't a Sagittaron citizen any more, and hadn't been since long before the Colonial legal system went up in mushroom clouds.

But the smells of home, the aroma of Old Tawa incense and sandalwood and cooking spices, those would always take her back like a magic door that could be cracked open just enough to glimpse another place, another life, but never wide enough to step through.

She wouldn't have wanted to anyway.

 So she wandered the marketplace, examining the paltry selection of clothing and trinkets that people had managed to bring with them as they fled the Colonies--the ones they were willing to part with for money or food or other necessities--and as she walked, she breathed in the scents of quiet and childhood and safety.

It hurt, damn it, but it was a clean hurt. It was a pain that cut deeply but sterilized its own wound as it bled, and she thought Kara might have been proud of her.

She was running her hand across a pile of badly laddered scarves laid out on a dented packing crate--not terrible condition for textiles these days, really, even for a better fleet market than this one--when a young woman slid into place beside her and reached across the pile of silk and linen with a smile.

Dee smiled back politely and stepped out of the way. She would have moved off down the row without a second glance except--

"You're Ana, aren't you?" Dark, luminous eyes stared back at her from a careworn face.

No. No, she emphatically was not.

She hadn't been Ana for a very, very long time.

"I'm sorry, miss--?" she said numbly, pulling away.

The stranger blinked at her in surprise, and Dee noticed the tiny child clinging to the woman's skirt. It was a tossup whether the child or the floor-length garment were dirtier.

"Missus," the woman said bluntly, and then put the last nail in Dee's composure. "Missus Abrams."

Oh, gods.

Before Dee could find words, Clay's widow was speaking again, a bitter twist to her lips. "You came to the funeral. I don't forget a face."

As Dee apparently did. She couldn't even remember the other woman's given name, though she supposed she must have heard it at some point. Maybe her father had mentioned the new Missus Abrams in one of his bitter letters. Maybe someone had said her name at Clay's burial.

She nodded acknowledgement of her own failure. "I go by Dee, now."

"Dee," Abrams said softly, but didn't offer a name in return. "I'm glad you made it."

"I am, too. Most days," Dee admitted, feeling very old. She thought, despite the other woman's pallor and her disheveled appearance, that Abrams had to be younger than her--certainly no older, if she'd been allowed to marry Clay. There were rules for these things in Sagittaron high society. Clay's wife would have been lesser in years than him, and she would never have been allowed to look this drawn, as a young wife, if she were still on Sagittaron.

Dee wondered how she herself would look now to someone who had known her all those years ago. Not that there was anyone left alive to notice new lines in her face--except maybe Karl.

Not that it mattered. They were all carrying new scars since the world ended.

But then, Dee wasn't living in Dogsville, either. "How are you doing down here?"

"We're surviving. Most days."

"I can only imagine."

"Now that that doctor is gone, things have been a little better. Lieutenant Agathon has done a lot to break up the looting and violence, too."

Of course he had. Dee smiled. "Good."

Abrams turned to meet Dee's eyes again and frowned. "What were you looking for?"

"I'm not sure," Dee admitted. What had she come here for, anyway? "The false illusion of closure?"

Abrams laughed, and the sound was light and carefree in the musty recesses of the hangar deck. "I know that one," she said.

The owner of the stall they'd been lingering near glared, apparently deciding they'd loitered long enough, and cleared her throat menacingly. Dee was one of Galactica's officers, for crying out loud. She could stand there as long as she frakking well pleased. But it wasn't worth arguing the point.

She shifted, ready to move along, and watched Abrams carefully detach her child's fingers from the folds of her skirt and lift the infant to her hip. Her hands were pale, fine-boned and aristocratic, like the rest of her; a delicate bloom lost in the mire. She straightened and met Dee's eyes again with that disarmingly frank gaze. "Walk with me?"

On the verge of refusing, Dee paused. The last person she wanted to talk to was Clay's widow, but what had she come looking for, after all, if not this?

"All right."

They made their way through the haphazard tables of the market, Dee a half step behind Abrams, trying not to stare at the small, filthy child in her arms.

"This is Clay Junior," Abrams finally said.

"How old?"

"He's five." Dee started, blinked down at the child. That would place his birth... Dee met Abrams' eyes and the woman nodded. "He was born six months after Clay's funeral."

Ouch. "That must have been hard."

"It was." That other things had been harder, since, went unsaid. She added, gently, "You can call me Elissa, if you like. No one calls me Elissabet anymore."

There was a quality to her voice that made Dee think the loss of old Sagittaron formality pained her as much as shedding those same traditions had liberated Dee.

Dee nodded cautiously. "I'll call you Elissabet if you'll call me Dee."

"You have a deal." She hefted the child higher on her hip and said, "This way."

Dee followed Abrams to a covered corner in the lee of a pile of empty storage bins and trash. A frayed prayer shawl hung across the space like a curtain, shielding the makeshift home from view. Inside, a few bundles of personal belongings were piled under another shawl, plainly serving as a table between two threadbare cushions.

Abrams set the child--Clay Junior, gods have mercy--down on one of the pillows and gestured Dee toward the other. "Please, sit down. It's not much, but I'd like to offer you hospitality."

"No, no," Dee waved her off. "I can't possibly take your--"

"Hush, it's only tea. It's the least I can offer someone from Old Tawa... and a friend who knew Clay."

"I never really knew your husband," Dee demurred rather than trying to distance herself from her roots--ultimately a very silly thing to argue about, when they were one fleet without a world, now.

Abrams looked up, startled, from rifling through a paper box full of mismatched tea bags. "Weren't you betrothed for years and years?"

"Um. Yes?" Dee stared at her in confusion for an awkward moment before she caught Abrams' meaning. "Oh! But we were so young when we were betrothed that the conventions weren't observed. We never met until the engagement party."

"You _what_?" She set the tea down so fast she all but dropped it. "Are you serious?"

"...Yes?"

"That's not normal."

Dee's breath caught in her throat, choked with some nameless emotion. "It's not?"

"Not even a little." Absently, she handed the box of tea to her son. "Junior, could you pick out the best smelling tea for us to serve our guest? And put it in the teapot? Thanks, honey."

Abrams pulled what might have been an old pillowcase or a very sad pillow out of one of the bundles forming the table. She settled next to Dee as her toddler leafed through the tea bags, sniffing them vigorously.

"So you and Clay never met until you were, what, twenty-one?"

Dee nodded, feeling like she'd been kicked in the chest.

"That's insane. You should have been introduced when your parents signed the contract. And then you would have had years to decide whether or not you were a good match. How old were you betrothed?"

"I was nine. Clay would have been... ten? Eleven?"

"Twelve years, eh?" Elissabet smiled fondly, plainly thinking of someone, and Dee knew it couldn't be Clay--her marriage to Clay had been too rushed, on the heels of Dee's departure, for it to conjure fond years of betrothal memories.

Dee jumped to the natural conclusion and asked gently, "What happened to your first betrothed?"

"He died."

"I'm so sorry," Dee said. "I can't imagine losing two--"

"It's all right," Abrams said softly. "We're all woven together by tragedy now."

"True enough."

"Clay used to say he and I had been brought together by our own personal tragedies--my betrothed's death, your leaving--and he'd remind me that sometimes the gods deliver us heartbreak so that they can give us more joy."

"I'm glad you were happy together."

"Clay was a good man, you know."

"I do know that," Dee agreed. "It's one thing I never doubted. I didn't leave because of him."

"I think he knew--I--we guessed as much." She met Dee's eyes again, her own dark and perceptive. "Were you happy? I think that's the one thing Clay wished he could have known after you left. That things were better for you, wherever you ended up."

Dee couldn't bring herself to tell a polite lie in the face of this much earnestness, but she wasn't sure how to tell the truth.

"Life is more complicated than I thought it was when I left Sagittaron," she admitted. "Sometimes I was happy. Sometimes I wasn't. But at least I was me."

"Ah," Abrams murmured. "And you couldn't be you at home."

"No," Dee agreed. "That wasn't possible. Not for me."

"I'm glad you found your way, then. And I'm glad you survived."

 

* * *

 

The tea was blandly understeeped in tepid water, mostly tasting like cardamon and cloves, and it was the best thing Dee had had to drink since she left Sagittaron. It made her wish she knew where to find the ingredients for her mother's traditional tea biscuits, because she wanted to repay the openhearted courtesy Abrams--no, Elissabet--had offered her with some sort of gesture. But pastry flour, sweet butter, fresh eggs? She wouldn't be able to afford those kinds of luxuries, even if she could somehow find them in the fleet.

In the absence of anything from home to offer, Dee managed to trade a piece of costume jewelry to Seelix in exchange for a chunk of toffee candy that the deck hands had cooked up from plant-based shortening and sugars--it wasn't anything like real toffee, but for a child who'd never known the real thing? It'd do.

She brought it down to Dogsville a few days later, in an awkward bundle with a couple of sweaters she hadn't worn in years; she and Elissabet were like enough in build that they would probably fit. She tried and failed to drop off the gifts and make a quick escape, but Elissabet wouldn't hear of it. Which was how Dee wound up staying for tea again, and promising to return.

She'd have to find something better to bring next time.

 

* * *

 

As Dee gathered up their cups and the remains of the toffee, Elissabet plucked a brass figurine from the prayer set scattered across the floor--Clay Junior had been showing it off--and extended the statue to Dee.

"Take it," she said.

It was Athena.

"I can't possibly..." Heart in her throat, Dee shook her head helplessly.

Elissabet frowned at her. "I saw you looking at the icons, in the marketplace. And you told Junior you'd left yours behind on Sagittaron. You should have it."

Had she been eyeing the icons at the marketplace stall before Elissabet approached her? She hadn't meant to, and she certainly couldn't--she didn't want--but--

She reached out and grasped the icon, the metal holding a hint of warmth from Elissabet's palm.

It wasn't the same statue she'd had as a child--it was obvious at a glance that the headdress was more ornate and the face carved with less detail than her Athena--but they were alike enough to have been crafted by the same hand, sister icons of the same goddess.

She couldn't possibly keep it.

She couldn't think of a polite way to refuse.

"But don't you--"

Elissabet shook her head. "I pray to Hera. When I can bring myself to pray. We're missing half the set anyway, and I think Athena should be yours. Junior won't mind, will you, sweetheart?"

The little boy frowned for a moment before nodding agreeably. Dee wasn't sure whether the child was uncomfortable around strangers, or was young enough that he hadn't yet started to speak, but either way his intent was clear.

Dee wavered. "Are you sure--"

"Absolutely sure," Elissabet told her. "Take it."

She wanted to accept the gift more than she was willing to admit.

"Thank you," Dee said finally, stroking the brass idly with her thumb and watching how the half light that filtered through the curtain reflected from the icon's golden finish.

"You're welcome."

"My father mailed my Athena to me on Caprica, at the military college, and I sent it back to him. It was all too fresh, and he said--" she stopped herself. "It doesn't matter what he said."

"I'm sure it mattered at the time."

"It did," Dee admitted ruefully. "Now I wish he was still alive to be saying it."

"I hated Clay's parents," Elissabet said guiltily, after a moment. "But I'd give a lot to have them here with me now."

"Yeah." Dee nodded. "I know what you mean."

Then again, she hadn't spoken with the Admiral in weeks, months maybe, outside the safe bounds of the CIC. So much for family.

"Maybe we were always going to have regrets," Dee said eventually, after a silence that she'd almost have called comfortable. "I tried to make decisions I couldn't hate myself for later, but maybe regrets are inevitable."

Elissabet shrugged philosophically. "The Cylons only made sure we didn't get to choose them for ourselves."


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Credit for the idea of "Leemericks" goes to my IRL friend JL, who can be relied on for an _abs_ olute _ly_ endless stream of puns objectifying Lee.

"You're going to think less of me, but I can't help that," Dee declared, "and I have to ask."

Sam laughed. "Can't wait to see where this is going."

"Nowhere good," she promised.

"My favourite kind of conversation," Sam said, setting his glass on the table. "All right, hit me."

"You said Lee was hot."

"...Yeah?"

"Since when do you think Lee is hot?"

"Uh, always?" Sam shrugged. "I think he's a self-righteous jackass, but he's hot. I'd tap that if I didn't have to listen to him talk while I did it."

She didn't want to laugh--Lee was still her husband and she should probably stand up for him--but she couldn't argue with any of it and, after all, poking fun at Lee was hardly the worst thing they could be doing. "You would not!"

"Mmm. Yeah, I would. There have been a few moments where I would have liked to throw that man up against a bulkhead and just, hmmm, have my way with him. Especially if I could gag him first."

"Sam!" People didn't talk like that on Saggitaron. People didn't _think_ like that. Sex was a private act, committed behind closed doors; lust was a private sin.

And that kind of puritanical thinking felt worlds removed from both her life on Caprica and her life now--except when it didn't.

"What?" Sam asked incredulously. "You can't tell me you don't understand the impulse. Not when you're married to that ass."

"I'll have you know, I am married to all of him," she told him firmly. "And not just his ass."

Sam snorted and smiled crookedly at her. "Thatta girl." It sounded far, far too much like _that's my girl_ , and her heart did something fluttery and not altogether unwelcome at the thought--which was a really epically bad idea, Dee, stop that.

"Shut up," she told him and herself, both.

"Hey, you started this."

"I did not!" she protested. "You started it when you referred to my husband as a hot piece of ass."

"He started it by being one."

"I know, right?" she drawled, too relaxed to care that whatever she was doing with Sam was the worst idea ever and probably always had been. "That ass."

"There once was a hot pilot ass," Sam intoned, "who wanted to fly way too fast--"

She shook her head, and liquor sloshed over the edge of her glass. "That doesn't rhyme, Sam."

"Sure it does!" he protested.

 _"Ass_ ," she enunciated carefully. _"Fast."_

"I'd like to see you do better."

"Fine." She thought for a moment. Sam grinned wickedly and it was all she could do not to reach across the table and flick him on the nose. This was getting ridiculous. She cleared her throat loudly and kept both hands wrapped tightly around her glass.

Ass. Fast. _Glass_.

"Go on, then," he said, still grinning.

"I married a dumbass named Lee," she began, and he hooted.

Two of Tyrrol's deck crew glanced over from another table, but turned away once they saw that it was just her and Sam. The two of them camped out together at Joe's was already old news.

Sam shrugged at her. "A dumbass named Lee? Go on."

"...Who frakked it all up royally," she continued more slowly.

"Nice."

"He needed his Starbuck, but he couldn't blame his luck," she paused and met his eyes. "'Cause we all miss her just as badly."

"Frak," he said. "I don't know if I should laugh, or cry, or applaud."

"I take payment in finger snaps. Like in all the emo poetry clubs back on Caprica." She pretended to bow and wound up clutching the edge of their little table to keep from toppling off her stool.

Now Sam laughed, long and loud, and if anyone turned to stare she didn't notice because she was too busy watching him.

The grin fell off his face slowly, and she could feel the change of subject in the air before he opened his mouth. "It's not just in my head, right? It really does all come back to Kara?"

"Obviously," she agreed.

He chuckled, a little hollow sob of laughter. "My crazy wife. If she'd had her way... we could have called ourselves the Thrace Group."

Dee caught herself laughing wetly, choked with pain and rage and terrible booze. "That shouldn't be as funny as it is but--frak. I can't believe she's really gone."

"Yeah. My Kara's too mean to die."

She refused to let her tears spill over. "Mine too."

"You know," Sam said eventually, "when I met Kara..."

She prodded his shin with her toes under the table. "When you met Kara?"

"Oh." He rubbed one hand over his face. "When I met Kara, I was--you know how I met Kara?"

"She found you and your guerillas up in the hills near Delphi." ~~~~

"Sorta, yeah. More like we found her and Helo--we thought they were skin jobs, tried to shoot them down on sight."

Dee nodded encouragingly.

"So there we were, all holding guns on each other, everybody's got twitchy trigger fingers, and I just knew--I knew--frak. It was one of those moments where you know your life's about to change but you don't know how exactly, yet, and you don't trust it."

"I've had those."

"Yeah. But more than that. I thought she was nuts when she said it, because it sounded like empty pillow talk, you know, but afterwards I knew--I just knew Kara was coming back for us. I could feel it in my gut. I knew she'd make it back to Caprica." He spread both hands expansively and smiled. "She wasn't going to leave me behind because she couldn't. The universe wouldn't let her. This was _not our fate_. You know? That feeling when you--I just knew."

Dee shook her head wordlessly.

"No?" Sam looked away and shrugged uncomfortably. "Oh."

Damn it. She hated to see Sam fold in on himself like that. "Doesn't mean I don't believe you. I just haven't felt that."

"Never?"

"I don't think so." Now it was her turn to shrug uneasily. "My family wasn't big on personal revelations. We were supposed to find our truths in the gods. In scripture." Or not at all. And she never had found any.

His eyes narrowed. "And you didn't believe in the gods."

"No." She shrugged. "Not in their gods, at least."

"Did you find other gods to believe in?" he asked--carefully, as if he already knew the answer.

"No." She shook her head. "But I found the military."

She could tell that he was reaching for something kind to say, something sympathetic.

"Don't pity me," she cut him off before he could. "I survived. That's more than you can say for most of the believers."

"True enough," he said with a nod. "Still..."

"I wish I could say I understood that feeling," she admitted. "I really do."

"Yeah, me too."

"I do believe you," she said, because it needed saying, and because she did. "Kara had a way of defying the odds and--fate aside, if she'd said she was coming back for me, I would've believed her, too."

He tilted his to the side and smiled. "Thought you didn't believe in anything?"

Damn it. "I did say that, didn't I?"

"Just a little."

"Well. You know. Kara."

"I do know Kara." He wiggled his eyebrows and she laughed.

"Yeah, yeah. You got the girl." Wonder of wonders, the words came out affectionate rather than bitter.

Sam raised his glass to her and she found she couldn't resent him for having married Kara--not any more. Sam was himself, strong and warm and cocky and indomitable, and of course Kara had fallen in love with him. Who wouldn't?

"You had her, too," he said. "She had those crazy visions, and she came and told you as well as me."

She dropped her glass on the table more loudly than she'd intended. "Some good it did. What does it matter now?"

"It matters. It's not over, Dee."

"What the frak do you mean, it's not over?" She glared across the table. "It's over. Kara's dead."

Sam shook his head helplessly. "It's not over. I'm sure of it."

"Sure of what?"

"This thing, with Kara, with you and me and even Lee--" he gestured vaguely. "It's not finished. It can't be done. Not yet."

"Sam--" Dee said, wanting either to shake some sense into him or comfort him, but finding herself at a loss.

"I know. Let me have my delusions."

"As if I could stop you."

"Nah." He smiled faintly. "Thanks for listening, though."

"Any time."

"Seriously. I can't think of anyone else I could have told half of this. You're a good friend, Dee."

"You're not so bad, yourself."

He was smiling at her again, the smile that warmed her to the pit of her stomach and left her feeling like a terrible person and a worse Evening woman.

"Dee--"

He reached out and she leaned in, not really sure what to do with her hands or where to look, and then she froze for a second as his arms came around her and pulled her in against his chest. He felt good, his shoulder solidly muscled beneath her cheek and smelling faintly of engine oil--he'd been training with the viper crew earlier. Under that she caught a whiff of detergent from his clothes and of clean sweat.

She let herself cling to him a little, soaking up how good it felt to hold another human being after a few weeks of being on her own--and not just on her own, but without Lee.

For all that Sam was a solid wall of muscle, something about having him wrapped around her reminded her viscerally of holding Lee in their last few months on Pegasus, when his weight had peaked and he'd been at his softest and most protective of her. Sam was still in pyramid condition--all lean, chiseled muscle like the celebrity athlete he'd been--but he was so tall and his shoulders so broad that she felt enveloped in his embrace, sheltered and warm. And, for obvious frakking reasons, stupidly missing Lee.

"Sam," she murmured, feeling more than a little lost.

He shifted, angling his face toward hers, and she found herself looking into the grey-blue of his eyes. He nudged her cheek with his nose, pulled back just far enough for alarms to start going off in the back of her mind and then--

He was kissing her.

His lips were warm, a little bit chapped, and he tasted like booze and algae crackers and something sweet that she couldn't name. He licked along her bottom lip, and she found herself fisting his tanks and pulling him in hungrily. One of his hands slid up her neck to cup the back of her head, the touch sizzling down her nerves.

Damn. She couldn't pretend to be surprised that Sam was a good kisser, because of course he was. He tasted incredible and kissed like the world was on fire and only she could put it out. She wanted him, she needed this--

Wait, no, they couldn't be doing this, there were a dozen reasons why they shouldn't be--

She pulled back, flushed and blinking up at him. He looked as breathless as she felt.

"We can't--"

"No--" he agreed, nodding rapidly.

Her heart plummeted.

Behind her, somebody whistled, and someone else shouted, "Get a room!"

She disentangled her leg from his, under the table, with as much decorum as she could muster.

"Shit." She thought of Lee, inevitably hearing about this in a few hours in his early morning pilot briefing, and her stomach hurt.

She'd just kissed Sam in public. Could she be more stupid?


End file.
